Workplaces build up a lot of documentation over time; anything from a annual task to this year’s company goals to staff meeting notes. But how often do you find yourself asking:

Where was that business plan doc? Was it in the Company/Assets folder? Or was it in Shared/Financials?

Similarly, this information rarely lives in isolation and often needs to be deduplicated and interlinked. Technically this problem is solved: the web was made for linking documents together. But the effectiveness of that linking is a human problem, not a technical one.

This is one of the many things librarians do. They take hordes of information and figure out how to categorize it and make it accessible. We generally think of the information as books, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be technical documentation or company history. Wouldn’t it be amazing to take the skill of library and information science and apply it to your companies Google drive or Confluence docs?

Could we make that happen? Could a handful of companies share a part-time librarian? Do consulting librarians exist?

I am not a librarian, so I don’t have anything to specifically recommend. I suspect that modern capitalism doesn’t have a lot of room in it’s budget for this kind of less-visible work as it doesn’t directly produce a product. But I think there is value, even to capitalists, in building infrastructure that ultimately makes that work more streamlined and consistent.

I also just like fantasizing about a world where the data I need is well-organized and easy to retrieve.