What would happen if you won the lottery and could leave your job tomorrow? What information would the next person doing your job need to have? What information would you leave behind to help that person pick up where you leave off?: Documentation!
Documentation is important because it helps to preserve institutional memory, allows future you to get up to speed, and can be a useful resource to share with colleagues. Yet this important activity is often neglected. Whether you’re not sure where to begin or because we’re all faced with perennial deadlines and constant day-to-day tasks, documentation all too often falls to the bottom of our to-do lists. To give everyone a chance to focus on documentation, the Professional Development Committee is hosting its fourth-annual Documentation Month this February!
Documentation toolkit
To support the community in creating documentation, members of LPC’s Professional Development Committee have created a Library Publishing Documentation Toolkit. It consists of four sections: Getting started with documentation, Planning a documentation day, Suggested documentation projects to tackle, and Sharing documentation beyond your institution. The toolkit is available in PDF and as a Google Doc.
Workshops/Community Calls
We will also be hosting a series of workshops/community calls focused on the theme of documentation and accessibility. We have four calls planned for four Thursdays in February:
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PDF Accessibility and Documentation, Thursday, February 1st (2-3 p.m. Eastern) with Angel Peterson
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Video Content Accessibility and Documentation, Thursday, February 8th (2-3 p.m. Eastern) with Matt Vaughn
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Google Docs Accessibility Documentation, Thursday, Feb 15th (2-3 p.m. Eastern) with Erin Jerome and Adam Mazel
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Accessibility and your Campus Institutional Repository: A Conversation, Thursday, Feb 29th (2-3 p.m. Eastern) with Carmen Mitchell and Amy Carpenter
Scheduling information and call details for these events will be sent out each week to the listserv. Please feel free to share widely within your institution, but these calls are open to LPC member libraries only, so please do not share outside the community.
Happy documenting!
From the Documentation Month planning group (Erin Jerome, Adam Mazel, and Matt Vaughn) on behalf of the LPC Professional Development Committee.