Although a long time ago, I vaguely remember being taken on the new boys’ tour of my high school library. Chiefly what I remember is a thing called the Dewey Decimal System, which was a system for classifying books that then mapped to where they were located on the shelves.
The system was implemented in a card index (remember, I said this was a long time ago) and that was where you could look up which books there were and so discover which shelf to find them on.
I mention all of this in the past tense without any knowledge as to whether this system persists but I expect modern real book libraries have far more sophisticated systems today. And so do companies with their vast digital libraries – and yet there’s something we really ought to learn from those long-ago days.
What I never did – because I was never a library volunteer – was put any book I returned after borrowing it back on its correct shelf. I just handed my books over and probably paid the fine due because they were probably late.
It was the library volunteers who put the books on that kind of trolley that is unique to libraries and trundled it around, returning the books to their rightful places on the shelves, following the Dewey Decimal System.
I don’t think many people would have liked it if it had been up to them to return their borrowed books to the correct shelves, instead of just handing them over to the expressionless volunteer at the desk. I don’t think it would have been done very well – not to the standard of the Dewey Decimal System. I’m confident, in fact, that it would have been done very badly, with books stuffed as quickly as possible into whatever vacant slot could be found.
Neither the library volunteers nor the mild geography teacher who served as librarian would have been able to do much to get a better quality result. They knew better than to try. In fact, they followed the universal script for libraries in not asking people to file their own returned books back but instead having dedicated people who knew the system and cared enough to do it right (they were, after all, volunteers – and most of them wanted to stay volunteers, allowed to remain indoors at break time in the calm of the library rather than face the playground).
The rest of us, (a) didn’t know the system and didn’t care to learn it; (b) didn’t really want to spend time filing books (we hadn’t volunteered for library duty, after all), and (c), well, even though I don’t want to own up to this myself, (c) is that most didn’t really think or care much about the confusion it would cause to others if books weren’t put back properly. A lack of thought and perhaps a lack of altruism.
So, where does this bring us? What I am going to say isn’t the whole story – there are other tactics and possibilities – and most have had some degree of success with them. But the point is worth making, I think.
I know from my work in KM that many KMers, in many organisations, for many years, have spent a great deal of effort trying to persuade people to volunteer for the library duty – i.e. title, tag and file their documents diligently according to a clever company schema devised to make it easy to then do all sorts of things, not least, find them again when they need them.
These schemas can be very well designed and very effective when applied correctly. And what we’re asking people to do really isn’t that hard – certainly nowhere near the hardest thing they’ll do at work that day and certainly within their intelligence and capability to do. And yet. And yet we hear constantly that this simple task isn’t done sufficiently well by sufficiently enough people to get the optimum result. And the reason is this…
It’s not that your system, your modern-day, corporate Dewey Decimal, isn’t great. It’s not that the task is beyond the wit of your colleagues. It’s just that … they didn’t volunteer for library duty. Doing that work well requires caring enough about that sort of thing. So you’d better get someone who has volunteered for that role, and let the others get back out into the playground.
AI4KM - Robert Taylor 