On 9/1/07, Lynn Reynish <lreynish_at_reginalibrary.ca> wrote:
> "Why? What has LIS got that the rest of the world could benefit from?"
>
> Ooookay. I see that James Weinheimer has already responded to the general tone of this snark. My response is more specific. CS is fairly infamous in the general business world and in the library world for not listening to customers - whether on the help desk or at the design stage. It's bad enough that there are streams of articles written on how to "talk" to your technical staff or how to "rein in" your technical staff. Having the attitude that your "client" has nothing to teach you (be they library, insurance company, Fortune 500 company or a fellow employee) does nothing to dispel this belief.
At this point I finally feel the need to jump and clear something up.
This started with Jim's initial response to Alex about "the CS people
giving us what they want and getting mad when we criticize" and
continues here.
Alex, Conal, Jonathan and others are talking about researchers (and
implementors) in the fields of Information Retrieval and Artificial
Intelligence.
All of the responses have been about what seem to be campus systems
administrators, arrogant developers and help desk staff, and that's
why "CS can't be trusted to help".
Please understand what sort of strawman this is and kindly refrain
from it, since your campus sysadmin and help desk person probably
would have no idea what these researchers (and implementors) do. The
programmer might, but I'm doubtful.
I wanted to make an analogy like "My next door neighbor is an Special
Collections librarian and she couldn't show me how to get my citations
from Web of Science into EndNote! Librarians are obviously of no use
at all!"
But actually the gulf between system administration and information
retrieval is much, much wider than that.
What I guess I don't understand is, those of you who are asking the
technologists to "show something", what are you going to "show us" as
an alternative? What is your plan? What are you arguing /for/,
exactly?
-Ross.
Received on Sat Sep 01 2007 - 08:21:48 EDT