AbstractThis paper describes a software sysem (SOFTLIB) that has been developed to assist in the management of software documentation generated during systems development projects. It provides facilities to manage large numbers of documents, to file documents when they are complete and to issue them to system developers and maintainers. It also includes an information retrieval facility that allows programming staff to find documents, to examine their contents before issue and to assess the state of the software project documentation. SOFTLIB is explicitly intended to help manage the documentation generated during software development — it is not designed for use by end‐users of that software or for managing end‐user documentation.The novel characteristic of this system is the approach that is taken to the consistency and completeness of documentation. The documentation associated with a software system is organized in such a way that it may be detected if document sets are complete (that is, if all documentation which should be provided for a software component is available) and if document sets are likely to be inconsistent. This means that if a document has been changed without a comparable change being made to other associated documents, this is detectable by the librarian system.In addition, a subsidiary aim of our work was to investigate the utility of menu systems to complex software tools by building a user interface to SOFTLIB. We conclude that menu systems are far from ideal in such situations because of the range of possible options which must be handled by the system.