The New York Times – We Built a Collaborative Documentation Site. Deploy Your Own With the Push of a Button. Library is searchable and renders content from Google Docs: “Maintaining useful documentation is hard. Whether it’s tips for running a program, publication guidelines or company rules, keeping track of resources can quickly become unwieldy. This is especially true at larger organizations where thousands of people care about similar tasks: It’s easy to end up with silos of duplicated instructions that only small groups of people know about.

The New York Times is no different. Several years ago, it was common for each desk to have an internal wiki that they used to collect these instructions. As the use of Google Docs grew within the newsroom, the wikis began to be used and maintained less frequently, and knowledge of existing documentation became scarce. When the older wikis were shut down in 2017, several teams that often collaborate realized we no longer had an effective strategy for sharing documents across the newsroom. We realized we could do better, and decided to build a centralized tool, called Library, that would host our documents in a way that could be shared across the newsroom.

Our solution to this problem has worked well for us. We hope others will find value in the technology we built, so we’re releasing Library to the open source community…”