Scholars could do a better job of analyzing real examples of technical communication. If you review academic publications on technical communication you can see that the citations of other scholars far outnumber any references to the primary material, that is, actual technical communications. In no other discipline in the university is so much written about a subject in the abstract, with so little actual examination of primary materials. Anyone studying Henry Fielding, say, needs access to ten or twenty yards of journals, scholarly books, and bibliographies, but we would also expect such a scholar to be familiar, in most cases, with the original novels, poems, and legal briefs. Our Library of Technical Communication would offer these scholars access to far more primary material than they have had a chance to explore.
Quick references work well in accordion booklets.
Task-oriented procedures serve people in the middle of their work, and that often means that these procedures should be incorporated into the software itself, as online help. To show beginners roughly what they can expect to do physically with a brand-new product, and what they can expect to see as they do it, video offers clear guidance. To leverage all the development costs of earlier manuals and online help, companies are beginning to post their documentation on information services such as America Online or CompuServe, on the Internet, and on the World Wide Web. Such online sites allow quick communication with the people these companies are trying to inform. Assembling a collection in many media presents challenges similar to those that contemporary librarians have faced creating CD-ROM stations, installing online catalogs, and offering computing services.