Remember when companies tried maintaining their own libraries?
Mid 1990s, during the infatuation with "learning organizations", we really struggled with onboarding and knowledge sharing. Surely we can do better, right?
So I got my archivist buddy hired. Extract domain knowledge from teams and individuals. Collect, aggregate, curate, and then reshare. Maintain our "library". Populate it with all the manuals, installation disks, training materials, textbooks, etc.
We'll never reinvent the wheel again. Woot!
Flew like a lead zeppelin.
--
Older me understands:
1) Forgetting is crucial to learning, moving forward, adapting.
2) Often times starting over is cheaper than finding prior answers.
I often wonder about my prior enthusiasm for Remember All The Things. Probably some mix of technophilia and existential dread (fear of being forgotten).
Any decision or rule without an attached name (advocate) is fair game for culling. If it was truly important, someone would care. Opposing change on principle is just being reactionary. Which isn't very helpful right now.
Yay for people who do work to remember. I'm in awe of modern historians like Jill Lepore. She's like a hacker or a genius, in that I can't even imagine how she comes up with her original content.
I'm not post-modern. We can learn plenty from the past. Alas, most first-person story tellers are unreliable narrators. And will probably record and archive all the wrong stuff.
Writing this out... I guess that's the difference between archivists and historians. There's no way for archivists to know what details may be important later.
Mid 1990s, during the infatuation with "learning organizations", we really struggled with onboarding and knowledge sharing. Surely we can do better, right?
So I got my archivist buddy hired. Extract domain knowledge from teams and individuals. Collect, aggregate, curate, and then reshare. Maintain our "library". Populate it with all the manuals, installation disks, training materials, textbooks, etc.
We'll never reinvent the wheel again. Woot!
Flew like a lead zeppelin.
--
Older me understands:
1) Forgetting is crucial to learning, moving forward, adapting.
2) Often times starting over is cheaper than finding prior answers.
I often wonder about my prior enthusiasm for Remember All The Things. Probably some mix of technophilia and existential dread (fear of being forgotten).
Old me rejects Chesterton's fence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
Any decision or rule without an attached name (advocate) is fair game for culling. If it was truly important, someone would care. Opposing change on principle is just being reactionary. Which isn't very helpful right now.
Yay for people who do work to remember. I'm in awe of modern historians like Jill Lepore. She's like a hacker or a genius, in that I can't even imagine how she comes up with her original content.
I'm not post-modern. We can learn plenty from the past. Alas, most first-person story tellers are unreliable narrators. And will probably record and archive all the wrong stuff.
Writing this out... I guess that's the difference between archivists and historians. There's no way for archivists to know what details may be important later.