> Secretaries were and still are generic, unspecialised workers. Not at all! They'd often have to train in procedures and lingo for various occupations, so the

> Secretaries were and still are generic, unspecialised workers. Not at all! They'd often have to train in procedures and lingo for various occupations, so they wouldn't screw it up and could be maximally useful. Medical secretaries, for example, were once a pretty big occupation (I'm sure they still exist, but there were once lots of them) and they absolutely had to train in e.g. medicine names and greek and latin prefixes and meanings (beyond just mega- or whatever). Secretarial training, often with a focus on an in-demand field, used to be something community and junior colleges offered. "Some level of technical knowledge" is consistent with the role secretaries used to perform and the skills they used to have, in many cases, at least when "secretary" didn't mean "door and phone answerer". Acting as an advanced, human file search and process figurer-outer ("can we do this with it?") was also part of their role, coming with the territory of being responsible for filing (and often for producing the documents being filed in the first place). If we have to go with "team librarian" for language/marketing reasons I'm still on-board, but "secretary" would be a fine label. That their often possessing significant domain knowledge not just as a side-effect of employment & experience but as part of their training is (perhaps?) no longer common knowledge is a sign of how far out of favor real professional-secretarial (that is, secretary to professionals) roles have fallen, I guess.