How Reference Librarians Can Help Us Help Each Other
summary
Applying reference-librarian practices to engineering teams claims to lower barriers to asking for help by doing concrete things: maintain a single-source-of-truth repo (README, Confluence pages, searchable incident reports), enforce style with automated tools like overcommit danger gem and RoboCop, preserve clean git commit history for traceable introductions, and run a reference dev rotation for deeper questions. Reference services decline from 1999–2004 then resurge in 2007, and internal Q&A/RCAs and documented runbooks demonstrably reduce repeated incidents.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Reference librarianship intro
- 2:33Data info and knowledge defined
- 8:13Historical foundations
- 11:26Library science evolution
- 19:27Librarianship and software engineering
- 21:34Reference questions and engineering parallels
- 26:47Complex problem solving
- 29:56Dev rotation and knowledge sharing
- 31:42Five Laws for engineering teams
- 33:49Closing remarks
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