Librarians in the Military: information management lessons learned during the Ukraine crisis

Real world crises are challenging for information professionals, especially when established data and information management processes struggle to handle urgent demands for data in a dynamic situation. In 2022, I put my librarian skills to the test when I took a break from my normal duties at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and deployed to Europe as the Civil Knowledge Integration (CKI) officer for the United States Army in Europe and Africa (USAREUR-AF.) My job as a CKI officer was to manage information requests, find ways to organize information, and facilitate information exchanges between units. On February 24, Russia invaded Ukraine kicking off a major conflict in Europe and the crisis of millions of people fleeing across international borders. This presentation will cover several lessons I learned when faced with the unanticipated challenge of witnessing war on our watch and helping manage the military’s information needs. I struggled with two universal problems in data and information management: volume and speed. While there was a wealth of information available, there were inadequate tools for consolidating and evaluating it. Frustration mounted as people attempted to “keep everything” and organization broke down. My first lesson learned was that understanding characteristics of information, like speed of flow and change, are essential in content management strategies. However, the main lesson learned was that information overload is not a technical problem. To quote NYU Professor Clay Shirky: “There’s no such thing as information overload. There’s only filter failure.” In a crisis, technological solutions rarely arrive in time, but applying proper analysis procedures, that focus vague and unanswerable questions into deliverable outcomes, is essential to success. The solution is not just about managing data, but how to ask a better question.