The tour guide and the librarian

A tour guide will show you around, and bring to your attention interesting details.

A librarian will help you find the books you request, or other books on a particular topic.

Tour guides have explicit, direct, knowledge transfer from you to them. They aren't always right, though. Their personal bias or collection of information will influence what they tell you.

Librarians have implicit, indirect knowledge transfer. They don't know all the answers themselves, but they know where you might be able to find them. However, their knowledge base is broad, too broad to deeply know every topic.

Tour guides are assumed to be experts. They are dressed in uniforms, and they've given the tour many times before. They know what questions people normally ask them. Tour guides usually come in two flavours: those that deeply know the topic they're presenting, and those who have memorised their script.

Librarians are also assumed to be experts. They know their collection of books very well, and may not have read them all personally but are familiar at a high level what content and topics are covered. Unlike tour guides, librarians aren’t assumed to be experts on the topic you want to learn, but are assumed to be experts on what their knowledge base contains.

When on a tour, the guide will move you along at their pace. They might take some time to answer questions, or to show something unscheduled, but it’s all on time. You are the captive audience of the tour. The tour guide is able to highlight and directly pass their knowledge to you.

When in a library, you move at your own pace. You might not need the librarian at all, but they're there to point you in the right direction when you need it. You are the passive audience of the library. The librarian is able to guide your learning, but leaves knowledge transfer up to you, and the source material. The books are only as good as the author, though. There’s no way to ask in-depth clarifications in real time.

When mentoring someone, it's important to understand whether they learn best from a tour guide or a librarian. Sometimes someone needs to be explicitly shown around, other times they might need to know where to find the answers themselves.

My personal preference is the librarian approach. But that's not true of everyone, and not every situation. When someone is new to a framework, language, or library, they might benefit most from being shown around and have their questions directly answered.

Open source is almost always the librarian style. Work situations are often a mix of the both. Librarians in a work setting can often also be tour guides, and vice versa. My intuition is that developers who have spent a lot of time in the open source world prefer the librarian style, but I could be wrong.

Improving documentation is often a great way to contribute to a library being more useful. Likewise, a well prepared, dynamic, tour can quickly ramp up someone’s ability to contribute.

My questions to the reader:

• Do you prefer a tour guide, or a librarian?

  • What situations would you prefer each in?

• Who are the tour guides or librarians in your community?

  • It could be open source, it could be a team, it could be a client.

• What do you appreciate most from either a tour guide or a librarian?