At 03:29 PM 8/8/2007, you wrote:
>But remember that Thomas Mann is a reference librarian,
>not a systems person. I'm not a systems person, either, so I'm not going
>to be as conversant with systems things as others.
Just for a point of clarification I wanted to add that I am also not
a systems person either. I'm actually a research librarian for a
high-tech R&D company. I spend around 50-70% of my time purely doing
research in either engineering literature, or business/market
research. The job-site I mentioned in an earlier post is just a side
project, and I'm also a CS student in the evenings.
The failings in our metadata (and the metadata of others) are not
theoretical for me they are road blocks to my daily work. Not
everybody has to completely understand various computational
solutions to information problems to know that they exist, what they
can do, and how they are different from what we currently do. I
think Alex makes a great point about the variety of achievable
solutions that really aren't discussed or looked at all in libraries.
Computer Science is simply: "The study of computation; the discipline
that is concerned with the methods and techniques related to data
processing performed by automatic means."
It's clearly a field that directly effects what we do. Every
librarian I know, in whatever capacity deals with processing data all
the time. For librarians to ignore much of the research in the CS
world would be the same as CS people ignoring much of the work being
done in the Electrical Engineering world.
The reason we haven't gone back to the moon isn't because the
technology isn't there, but because of attitudes surrounding the
situation. The desire and ambition to go back to the moon (or beyond)
isn't there, and so we remain on the ground.
--Will
Received on Thu Aug 09 2007 - 07:55:29 EDT