Library management best practices

An empty library is useless. A bloated library without organization becomes a mess. This page gathers practices that help keep your libraries (narratives, images, contract templates) usable long-term, whether you work alone or as a team.

Feed, don’t bulk-create

The temptation when creating an account is to want to prepare everything in advance. It rarely pays off. Prefer:

Start minimal — use the base banks and a single system contract template at first.
Capitalize as inspections happen — every time you phrase a narrative well or find a perfect illustration for a case, save it on the spot.
Review periodically — once a month or quarter, browse your libraries to clean or consolidate.

A library built in reaction to your real practice is more useful than one built from scratch.

Tagging and naming conventions

Searches in the Narrative Bank and Image Bank become powerful only if content is well tagged. A few principles:

Uniform tags

Choose and stick to a fixed vocabulary. For example, for components:

foundation (not foundations nor Foundation).
roofing (not roof nor cover).
plumbing (not pipes).

Inconsistency dilutes search results. A reference table in a personal note or a shared team document settles the issue.

Theme tags

Beyond the component, add tags by problem type:

moisture, infiltration, condensation.
code, bnq, nbc, gcr.
safety, urgent, expertise.

Three tags per content piece is generally enough.

Narrative naming

For the Narrative Bank, the narrative title helps retrieval. Prefer a descriptive and factual title:

✅ “Stair-step vertical crack in concrete foundation wall”
❌ “Wall crack”

In a team (master account + inspector sub-accounts), each piece of content can be private or shared. Three typical cases:

To keep private

Your drafts under development (not yet validated for regular use).
Experimental phrasings you test on a few inspections.
Personal notes you want to remember without cluttering the team.

Your proven phrasings, validated across multiple inspections.
Key illustrations that all your colleagues would use.
Standardized contract templates for specific cases that the whole team encounters.

Not to put in a library at all

Content too specific to a single file (a narrative very particular to one inspection).
Illustrations taken in the field for a specific file (they belong to the report, not the bank).

Regular maintenance

Beyond daily feeding, plan two regular moments:

Quarterly review

Once a quarter, take 30 to 60 minutes to:

Browse your most-used narratives and improve phrasing if you have found better.
Delete narratives that you have never used in 6 months.
Complete missing tags on content accumulated without proper tagging.

Annual review

Once a year, a deeper review:

Verify that your contract templates reflect your current practice (rates, exclusions, deadlines).
Sort out illustrations that have become obsolete (construction practices that have evolved).
Align with standard evolutions (BNQ, NBC, GCR) if they affect your standard phrasings.

Working as a team on libraries

If you are several inspectors under the same master account, a few principles to avoid chaos:

Designate a steward — someone who validates additions to the shared bank and runs regular reviews.
Document your conventions — a short document (one page) listing official tags and sharing rules.
Organize review sessions — for example one hour every three months when the team reviews recent additions and discusses phrasings.

These rituals cost little and prevent the inconsistent accumulation that can kill the usefulness of a shared library.