Libraries App Overview

Libraries

1. What it is

Libraries lets you organize company resources into curated collections that
different groups of people can browse and search. A collection can hold external
links, uploaded files, images, and videos — and it can also point directly at an
internal form, survey, wiki page, post, or HR file, so the resource opens where
it already lives instead of being copied.

Each library is targeted at an audience rather than published to everyone, and it
is searchable across everything a person is allowed to see.

• Enablement: Libraries is a licensed app and is off until an admin turns it
  on for the tenant from the Apps Marketplace.
• What it is not: it is not a file store like Drive. A library mostly curates
  pointers — a link, or a live internal record — though an item can also carry
  an uploaded document, image, or video. When an item points at a record that is
  later archived or deleted, the item shows as unavailable rather than linking
  into a dead end.

2. Standing it up

1. Turn the app on. In the Apps Marketplace, enable Libraries for your
   tenant (it requires a license).
2. Go to Libraries → All Libraries and choose New library. Give it a
   name, then set two separate access decisions:
   • Visibility — All Users, or Specific Audiences (users, groups,
     departments).
   • Who can add or remove items? — Everyone, Admins and specific users,
     or Admins only.
3. If you chose Specific Audiences, add one or more audience rules. Each rule
   targets a department, location, group, job family, job title, organizational
   role, platform role, or a named individual. A rule grants sight only — it
   carries no curation role of its own. Who may add or remove items is a
   separate list of named people (see step 5).
4. Add categories to the library, then add items to each category. When
   you add a form, survey, wiki, post, or HR-file item, a picker offers only
   records that are actually reachable — a draft wiki page or an archived form
   never appears.
5. If anyone besides an administrator should curate the library, name them
   individually and give each one Contributor (add, edit, and remove items)
   or Manager (all of that, plus renaming the library, setting its audience,
   and organizing its categories).
6. Confirm it worked: a member of the target audience should now see the library
   under All Libraries, be able to open its items, and find its contents in
   search.

The pairing that catches people out: audience rules only take effect when a
library’s Visibility is Specific Audiences. Adding rules to an All Users
library changes nothing. Likewise, choosing Admins and specific users for
item management grants curation to no one until you also name the individual
people who should have it — an audience rule never grants it, however the rule
is targeted.

3. How it fits together

Library → Category → Item. A library is a collection; categories group items
inside it; an item is a single resource. For example, a Company Policies
library might contain a Time Off category holding a PTO Policy item (linked
to a wiki page) and a Request Time Off item (linked to a form).

Item types. An item is one of: a simple link, a file (a link to a document or
an uploaded document), a form, a survey, a wiki page, a post, an image, or a
video. The form/survey/wiki/post types point at a live internal record, so the
library reflects that record’s real state — a page moved back to draft shows as
inactive rather than as a working link.

Two access questions people conflate. These are set separately on every
library and answer different things:

• Visibility — who can see the library at all. Governed by the library’s
  audience rules when set to Specific Audiences.
• Who can add or remove items? — who can curate its contents. This is the
  library’s management level, and it is independent of who can see it.

There is also a third, quieter level — administering the library itself
(renaming it, changing its audience, organizing its categories). That is reserved
for Libraries administrators, the person who created the library, and anyone
named as a Manager. Deleting or disabling a library is narrower still: a
platform admin or a Libraries app admin only.

How each is granted. Sight and curation come from two different lists, and
this is the distinction most worth learning:

• Audience rules grant sight. Anyone a rule matches can open the library. A
  rule carries no role beyond that, whatever it targets — so no group,
  department, or platform-role rule can make someone a curator.
• Named memberships grant curation. You name individual people, each as a
  Contributor (add, edit, and remove items) or a Manager (all of that,
  plus renaming the library, setting its audience, and organizing its
  categories). There is no Viewer membership — viewing is the audience’s job.

The management level decides who those curators are allowed to be: under Admins
and specific users it is the named contributors and managers; under Everyone
it is anybody who can see the library; under Admins only it is administrators
alone. A Manager keeps library administration at every level — the management
level governs items, not the library record.

Disabled is not deleted. Disabling a library hides it from everyone except
admins and excludes it from search, while keeping all of its content — useful
while you reorganize it. Deleting a library removes it, everything in it, its
audience, and every contributor and manager role held in it — and there is no
trash to recover any of it from.

Boundaries with other apps. When an item links a form, survey, wiki page,
post, or HR file, Libraries owns the pointer and the other app owns the record —
the picker only offers records from apps that are enabled for the tenant.
Content-governance reviews run on the shared platform governance pipeline, the
same one Drive and Wikis use.

4. Running it

Reorder libraries, categories, or items

1. On All Libraries (or inside a library), open Reorder while in Admin
   Order.
2. Move rows up or down and save. The order you set is what everyone sees.

Take a library out of service temporarily

1. Open the library and use its Enable/Disable control (admin only).
2. While disabled, it is hidden from members and dropped from search but keeps
   all its content; re-enable it to bring it back.

Review library health in Insights

1. Go to Libraries → Insights (admin only).
2. The Governance panel lists libraries with open findings — items that are
   stale or links that no longer resolve. The Knowledge Gaps panel lists
   searches employees ran that returned nothing, over a 7- or 30-day window.
3. Both panels only show data when their feature is switched on in Settings.

Support employees browsing and bookmarking

Employees browse libraries in a card view or a collapsible tree, search across
every library they can see, and bookmark items they use often. Bookmarks are per
person and item-only; the same content and bookmarks are available on mobile and
through a browser extension that clips a page straight into a library.

5. Settings

Found under Libraries → Settings (admin only).

Setting	Default	What it changes
Enable Libraries AI Agent	On	Whether the Libraries assistant answers in Ask AI
Default Library View	Modern View	The starting layout of All Libraries — a card grid, or a collapsible tree
Default Permission for New Libraries	Admins only	The item-management level a newly created library starts with
Who can create a library?	App admins	Which people may create libraries; a Contributor grant also allows it
Enable Auto-Governance for Libraries	On	Whether libraries are scanned on a schedule for stale items and broken links
Default Review Interval (days)	90	How long a library can go unreviewed before it is flagged
Check for Broken Links	On	Whether the governance scan also checks external links
Include Libraries in Global Search	On	Whether library content appears in the platform-wide search
Notify Users When New Items Are Added	Off	Whether audience members get a notification when an item is added
Send Governance Review Reminders	On	Whether the people responsible for a library get its review reminders
Enable Knowledge Gap Analysis	Off	Whether zero-result searches are collected and analyzed for gaps
Send Gap Analysis Summaries	On	Whether gap summaries are sent when gap analysis is on
AI: Search & Recommendations	On	Whether the assistant can search and recommend resources
AI: Browse & Details	On	Whether the assistant can browse a library and open item details
AI: Statistics & Reports	On	Whether the assistant can report counts and breakdowns
AI: Content Management (Admin)	On	Whether admins can add, edit, move, or remove items via the assistant, with confirmation

The governance scan runs weekly and stays silent on day one — it has nothing to
flag until content exists and ages past the review interval. The AI Content
Management tools are admin-only and always ask for confirmation before they
change anything.

6. More help

• Libraries FAQ — specific setup and operating questions, and troubleshooting
• Ask AI — the Libraries assistant answers questions about your resources, and
  about the app, from these articles.