Your company probably needs a librarian. Maybe more than one.

A modern librarian selects, installs, configures and administrates knowledge management software. They are experts in organizational methods and search techniques.

A librarian may take in paper documents and convert them to electronic formats. Everything gets stored, indexed, and made searchable and retrievable. Wikis are re-organized, old information marked for review and status updated: is it still correct? reliable? useful?

You have email that concerns a whole team, contracts with history, agreements with revisions. Librarians control the automation that keeps track of that for you. You have customer contact databases – a librarian knows that in addition to names, phone numbers and email addresses, you need to store the date you entered the contact, the last time anyone successfully used it, and whether they are current customers. Librarians are good at establishing criteria for automatic pruning.

Your people send documents around by mail. Librarians can help you de-duplicate, and also track revision history. Do you have an internal instant message facility, or chat rooms? Librarians figure out how to pull the archives in so that you can find the discussion years after you switched to a different service. They integrate search services so that you get all the relevant results in formats that you can use. If you produce animations, videos, audio or music, you already have a librarian – or everybody is part-librarian, and it isn’t very efficient, is it?

Your company probably needs a good librarian.