This is a pretty cynical generality to make, and certainly not true in
many cases. Libraries that do not hire the best person that they could
afford to hire for the task at hand are pretty short-sighted and would
certainly not be able to keep up on the technology side without
qualified programmers, DBAs, Web designers, and so on. The NCSU
Libraries, while hardly a small- to medium-sized institution, routinely
hires IT professionals to build Web apps and/or databases, and to design
and implement our Endeca search environment. In some cases, these folks
also have an MLS/MIS, but in others they do not. However, it could
easily be demonstrated that hiring people with an investment in the
public service mission of the library is pretty much mandatory if you
want to retain these IT professionals. Libraries of any size are not
going to be able to compete with Google or EA on salaries and benefits,
so IT folks who are primarily interested in making big bucks and hanging
out with other gaming nerds would probably not be happy in a library
setting. This might be one reason we tend to hire librarians rather
than IT people. On the other hand, if the IT person was committed to
our mission and willing to work for libraryish salaries, we would be
fools not to hire them.
Charley
Tomasz Neugebauer wrote:
> Jesse,
>
> You said, "Since hiring a devoted tech person with coding and other development skills is not possible for most small (and many mid-sized) libraries [...]".
>
> I think that libraries *choose* not hire people with information technology skills. Hiring an IT professional with project management expertise might be perceived as an admission that librarians are not self-sufficient, that they need software engineers and information systems analysts to innovate the library. Libraries attempt to hide this "insufficiency" by choosing instead to 'outsource' IT needs. The idea here is to buy the library technology needs like a product, just like they have been buying books - business as usual. The result is the perpetuation of insufficient information technology expertise within libraries. This is a choice (a mistake), not a result of 'impossibility'.
>
>
> Tomasz Neugebauer
> Digital Projects & Systems Development Librarian
> tomasz.neugebauer_at_concordia.ca
> Concordia University Libraries
> 1400 de Maisonneuve West (LB 341-3)
> Tel.: (514) 848-2424 ex. 7738
>
Received on Mon Sep 08 2008 - 11:56:05 EDT