How to prevent the burning of the Library at Alexandria

As a former Classics professor, one of the ancient historical events that always intrigued me the most was the burning of the Library at Alexandria in Ptolemaic Egypt. The Library was for a while the most significant research center and collection of papyrus texts in the ancient Mediterranean world, and while there’s some discrepancies in the accounts of what happened in 48 BCE, it’s clear that there was a large fire and many unique texts burned and in many cases were lost forever. When I was in grad school, the other students and I often played a game in which we’d name literary texts we wished had survived, as well as surviving texts we’d be willing to trade for them.

So what does this event have to do with content design? The burning of the Library at Alexandria is an evocative image that we can use to guide our ways of thinking about how we record critical institutional knowledge. Documenting content-related patterns, guidelines, and team decisions is always important, but especially so in uncertain times, when there are layoffs, reorgs, and restructuring happening at many tech companies. If you think about it, there's likely a large number of content guidelines and patterns that your team has that guide content design and content production, but that are actually unwritten. Or maybe they're recorded somewhere, but in dusty documents that no one ever updates or even visits anymore. Or worse, they might be in your team Slack thread about 2000 messages ago.

This might not seem like a problem if there's always someone you can ask. Maybe there’s a style guide expert on your team who’s always open to questions like “Hey, can you remind me how we represent a null state in a key value pair?” I’ve been that person on several teams, and I’ve often benefited from their knowledge when it’s someone else. But in times of uncertainty and flux it's not a good idea to rely fully on these informal systems of knowledge transfer and circulation. It’s important that we not expect that any given person is going to be on the team forever, because that's setting your team up to lose valuable institutional knowledge and that change can happen unexpectedly, without time to prepare. That said, you can’t record everything, so I suggest opening discussions with your team to align on how you decide what is critical to record, what processes should guide how it’s recorded, and how to make sure that you're recording it in a place where folks will continue to be able to view and use it. It’s also a good idea to think about maintenance, because documentation of guidelines and decisions will eventually become stagnant and out of date if they’re not updated. Luckily it’s a lot easier for us to preserve information in the digital age than it was in the age of papyrus, when duplicates had to be painstakingly created and archived in separate locations. So take some time now to think about how to preserve your team’s valuable institutional memory, so it doesn’t disappear into the mists of time in a Slack channel.