This post was written by Emily Woehrle, who attended the 2025 DLF Forum as an Emerging Professionals Fellow. The views and opinions expressed in this blog post are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Digital Library Federation or CLIR. 2025 Emerging Professionals Fellowships were supported by a grant from MetaArchive.
Emily Woehrle is a Digital Content Librarian at the University of Toronto Libraries, where she supports a large-scale website renewal project and manages the library’s LibGuides service. She also works as a part-time librarian at the Toronto Public Library. With a background in non-profit communications and content management, Emily brings an interdisciplinary perspective to her work and looks forward to sharing experiences and learning from peers at the DLF Forum to advance sustainable, user-centered digital library practices.
Documentation as responsible digital stewardship
Attending the DLF Forum as one of the Emerging Professionals fellows was an incredibly positive experience that left me with new connections, new ideas, and a validating sense of solidarity. The Forum was only my second library conference, yet I felt immediately comfortable among people who get it and were ready to share and listen to each other’s experiences. It was also a joy to navigate the conference with my fellow Fellows.
Two presentations stood out to me over the course of the Forum, and neither focused on trendy hot topics. Instead, they highlighted the importance of documentation; the practical, behind-the-scenes work that keeps digital libraries and archives running by codifying tacit knowledge and establishing the workflows, structures, and guidelines that sustain digital library work.
In my current role, I’m coordinating a large-scale website consolidation project that requires my colleagues and me to build processes and governance structures impacting 20+libraries and departments. Documentation has become essential to scaling the project and keeping everyone aligned. Over the past year, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the most effective ways to develop knowledge-management systems, why some workplace cultures prioritize them more than others, and what that means for long-term success.
The first session, “Agile Documentation Development for Digital Preservation Systems,” offered strategies to make documentation immediately useful, iterative, and collaborative. The presenters emphasized creating “minimum viable documents” that favor progress over perfection – start with something usable, then refine it over time. They also underscored how role clarity and interdepartmental culture shape the success of documentation efforts. This session helped me reframe documentation as a living tool whose maintenance must be built into our work rather than treated as an afterthought.
The second session, “Renaming Failure as “readme.files”: Lessons Learned from Early and Mid-career Archives Perspectives,” reminded me that unexpected challenges are inevitable and that they can serve as learning opportunities instead of being perceived as failures. The speaker spoke about the importance of recording “detours” as they happen and how documentation can play a key part in reflection on lessons learned. She also discussed the value of using documentation to close “open loops” when offboarding from a project, ensuring that future staff can build on past work rather than unknowingly duplicating it. It was a practical reminder that documenting failure isn’t about dwelling on mistakes; it’s about giving the next person a clearer path forward.
Taken together, these sessions reinforced that documentation is more than a checklist. It can be a form of care—not only for colleagues and users who will later take on or inherit the work, but also for the library systems that depend on it. Creating collaborative documentation is an often overlooked and undervalued core competency, yet it is fundamental to both project and organizational success. I left the Forum with a renewed commitment to integrating these approaches into my own knowledge-management practices and to advocating for clearer, more collaborative documentation across the teams I work with.