More on the Importance of the Knowledge in People’s Heads
On Wednesday, I linked to a Wall Street Journal article about how the National Archives and Records Administration is working on preserving digital information.
A Wired piece about Mr. Taylor, an 84-year-old employee of NARA, is circulating through the librarian community because it highlights the importance of the knowledge in employee’s heads, especially those employees who have worked in an institution for a long time.
"Of course, no matter how the system evolves between now and 2011, one module it won’t encompass is Mr. Taylor. While Lockheed’s design prototype emphasizes intuitive access for users ranging from amateur genealogists to career paper pushers, no software on the market today or in the future is likely to have the veteran archivist’s idiosyncratic expertise, his intuitive grasp of the collection’s contents."
No matter how flashy a new system is, it probably can’t account for the kind of data that nestles in our brains, sticks in our hippocampus. How can we download our brians or make them open source so others can benefit from our knowledge?
January 11th, 2006 at 3:34 pm
well, i’m trying to brain-dump as much as i can into our internal wiki. not quite as good as the excellent crossreferencing i can do in my brain, but it’s something, and hyperlinking can at least enable a decent amount of cross-ref.