If you are working in a corporate environment, and especially if you are writing training programs, your focus of knowledge capture and transfer is immediate. You have a procedure or a technique or a leadership program that you are instituting now, and it is relevant for the immediate future.

Sometimes, however, you are writing training or capturing knowledge for the long haul. You might be preserving the words of a founding CEO. Or one of your R&D people has made a groundbreaking discovery that changes the way things are done in your industry. That kind of knowledge capture requires the guarantee that it is preserved in a way that it can be recovered later.

We really like physical documents for that reason. Nothing like a stone tablet to preserve some good ideas, right? Monks have dedicated their lives to rewriting valuable works because paper products disintegrated over time, and it was the only medium they had at their disposal. Not all valuable knowledge is codified in writing. After all, there is good old on-the-job (OTJ) training. Through apprenticeships and mentoring, processes are demonstrated and passed on in the working environment and preserved as a matter of common practice. Recent wisdom tells us that training is a 70-20-10 split – 70% OJT, 20% elearning and 10% classroom learning.

Our age, though, the information age, holds so much more possibility for what we can capture, preserve and pass on to future generations. Wouldn’t you like to watch a craftsman from 1860 build a window? Imagine the little tricks of the trade that have been lost to the ages.

Those things don’t have to be lost anymore. The trick is to find the right medium for capture, and that medium has to be one that can be accessed in the future. So, those early elearning programs I wrote that landed on VHS that people watched on a big old cathode ray tube in the conference room, or those audio cassettes they listened to in the car? Gone. Nothing on there is of much relevance anymore, so nobody will lose sleep over that.

But what of the precious words of your founding President who set the tone for your company, and maybe an industry, a la Steve Jobs?

Today, the technology of knowledge capture makes possible watching someone assemble a window and see all the little tricks that might not make it into the assembly manual.

Which leads us to the issue of preservation.

A Very Cool Book on Preserving Knowledge

Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia by Gregory Benford is a curious little book written in 1999 by a University of California physics professor whose work includes experiments in the fields of astrophysics and plasma physics. He is best known for his award-winning science fiction including the Galactic Center Saga series. In his non-fiction work, Deep Time, he describes how humanity interprets former civilizations by studying architecture, tombs, layers of the earth and time capsules. For example, he explains, we leave behind clues relevant to our time and culture, like placing a Buns of Steel video in a time capsule to tell future generations…what? (I will leave it for you to interpret the value of this human legacy.)

In one particularly striking example that leads me to discuss this book, however, Dr. Benford was part of an Expert Judgment study group hired by the Department of Energy to leave a “Warning: Do Not Enter” message on a nuclear waste site in New Mexico to be interpreted by future inhabitants/visitors/species for up to 24,000 years. So it begged the question not only of how messages are sent and delivered across time, species, and cultures, and what kind of messages are sent, but also the methods by which those messages are preserved.

At our present level of technology, we deem that we can preserve what is valuable – or we perceive to be valuable (see Buns of Steel video) – using digital language preserved in the cloud.
Professor Benford writes: “Strikingly, no libraries survived antiquity, though some were quite grand. A Christian mob burned the greatest trove of ancient writings, the Library of Alexandria, taking from us hundreds of thousands of papyrus and vellum scrolls. Writing on organic sheets is vulnerable to fire, whether from fanatics or accident. Acid-free paper withers in a few centuries.” (Deep Time, p. 15)
He goes on a bit later in the book to describe the vulnerabilities of what, in 1999, was state-of-the-art technology.

“Worse, nothing dates more quickly than computer equipment. Already, historians cannot easily decipher the punch card and tape technology of 1960s computers, and the output of early machines such as Univac are unintelligible.” (Deep Time, p. 61)

“…I imagined my own works, stored in some library vault for future scholars (if there are any) who care about such ephemera of the Late TwenCen. A rumpled professor drags a cardboard box out of a dusty basement and uncovers my collective works: hundreds of 3.5 inch floppy disks, ready to run on a DOS machine using Word Perfect 6.0,” he wrote(Deep Time, p. 60)

If you are a trainer, you probably have very little concern for this type of long-term preservation. After all, you aren’t capturing and passing on knowledge that needs to be preserved for a thousand years. Or are you?