Preserving technical knowledge - when technology's lifetime exceeds the human life span

Industry is being challenged by the departure of experienced managers and workers. The loss of skills and the difficulty of finding qualified replacements can negatively affect operations, environment, safety and economics. There is a need to capture, preserve and pass along both documented and undocumented knowledge before aging workers depart the workplace. How to do it? Our ancestors faced the same problem, and they often solved it in a personal way through a Master-Journeyman-Apprentice system. Our modern education system is an extension of that system, augmented by extensive use of textbooks. This system now is stretched to its limits by two factors, (a) the need to update the teacher's knowledge, and (b) the need to update high quality textbooks. Modem Masters are so busy doing their work that they have no time to pass knowledge on in an effective manner. When they retire, their knowledge often is lost. The CANTEACH project was initiated to fill this gap. The essence of this knowledge capture process is acquisition of archival documents that are relevant to current practice in the field-in our case, CANDU power plant engineering. This project is made possible by voluntary contributions from Masters in the field; it can proceed only by avoiding the pitfalls of excessive security and intellectual property rules. This paper describes the mechanisms used to make this archival knowledge openly available for operators, designers, educators, and students of this technology. (author)