The librarian

Before the Internet, a library wasn’t something you looked at on screen. It was an actual building in your town, with bookshelves and physical books you could borrow. And it had another curiosity – the librarian. Silent, expressionless and unnoticed, the librarian was, nonetheless, the utter key to this system working.

What did the librarian do? When a new book arrived, the librarian added its details to the catalogue – title, author, genre, edition, publisher, ISBN number and so on. At one time I remember this being on a cardex* – a box full of index cards. Later it was on a computerised system.

And critically, the librarian put a sticker on the spine of the book denoting where it belonged both in terms of the catalogue and in the physical space of the library. And that is where the librarian put the book, so that, when you asked them “Do you have The Book of Common British Birds?” the librarian would look it up** and tell you “Yes, it’s on shelf H10 in alphabetical order” and would point you to bookcase H. Or they could tell you “Yes, but it’s out. Would you like me to reserve it for you?”

And here’s the really clever bit: When you returned The Book of Common British Birds they didn’t let you figure out where to put it back, even if you remembered it was H10. No, you deposited the returned book on a weird bookcase on wheels that they later trundled around to replace all the returned books to the right spaces.

In the same era, it was obvious to companies large and small that all the bits of paper floating around needed keeping in a similarly sensible way. The larger ones had libraries and librarians of their own, some had archivists. Most had large areas of storage for all the dockets and tickets and chitties and invoices and receipts and contracts and delivery notes and … everything. Every department had filing cabinets and it was an important matter to file all this stuff properly. This was well understood by everyone.

I’m not being too nostalgic here and not looking at the past with rose-tinted spectacles. I’m a tech enthusiast and from the start recognised The Internet as the biggest thing ever. It has made lots of document-oriented tasks and needs far easier to address … I don’t need to list the benefits and achievements. But one thing is missing from the picture. Or one person.

Of course this is sweeping generalisation, yet, broadly speaking, throughout my career as a consultant and manager, working on issues that often involved documents and data in some form, I’d have to say I’ve seen fewer and fewer librarians in major organisations. I mean, none for years to be clear. I know there are still some and maybe it’s just that my work doesn’t take me their way. However, this is rather less about the librarian per se than it is about what they did and what now we all need to do: My work does take me the way of many people whose job is intimately concerned with documents, albeit electronic ones. They create them, edit them, receive them and share them, read them (possibly?), and store them somewhere in the electronic system.

The expectation of people is still the same as that young boy I was in the 1970s standing at the counter of the public library and asking for ‘The City of Gold and Lead’ by John Christopher i.e. that if they did then the librarian would know where it was, and so on. Today it’s not a librarian or archivist but a search engine and the expectation is still that it will know the answer and tell you.

However, what did we do? IT and the Internet gave us search and wonderful electronic document management tools with access on your screen, to your desk, at your fingertips. The benefits were huge and obvious. And, I guess, because everyone could access it, it became everyone’s job and nobody’s job to look after the stuff.

It was like the librarian took a long break. It was like, every time there was a new book you could do your best in ignorance to put it in the catalogue the right way, or not bother; label it or just don’t; put it on the right shelf or leave it in a pile in the corner.

Of course, you can implement the same kind of community spirit and shared values in your team as existed in the days of the filing cabinet: everyone does it properly because that helps everyone out. But it takes organisations a long time to figure out that most people didn’t take a job as a librarian: they know and care about this stuff a whole lot less than you might like and, whilst you can improve matters with training and design and so on, unless you change that motivation little is likely to improve.

When we went online, lots of things changed, but we ought to have kept the spirit and role of the librarian, because one of the keys to the smooth running of documents and information is a person who knows and cares more than most do about this stuff, because that is their profession. Not having document managers has turned out to be a costly saving, precisely because ‘everyone’s job’ is a waste of everyone’s time.

** A word the spelling checker no longer remembers … <sigh>

* In real life they knew without looking.