On 12/09/2008, Karen Coyle <lists_at_kcoyle.net> wrote:
> It seems to me to be a no-brainer.
Yes, but it won't hold up to committee scrutiny, so will never happen.
But I think you've got a far worse problem; you haven't got any cool
jobs around. How can you hope to attract talent if the jobs are
boring, under boring supervision, with a boring salery to boot? Sorry
mate(s), but as long as you let librarians govern there won't be good
tech. I have so little faith in this ever changing. I *wish* it wasn't
so, but anywhere I go in the library world (being in it, talking to
all of you, seeing it from a distance) you get the same "repository of
some stuff no one really needs using some boring software that's
almost already obsolete".
Even going through Eric's list of "librarian techie must-have skills"
list I find it severly lacking, only preparing you for what is
becoming increasingly obsolete today. Relational databases? XML? IT
management? Software life-cycle? This is all 101 stuff. Libraries are
supposed to be experts in information management, and you want to do
it with 101 technology? Surely you jest!
Where are the experts in cloud computing, in clustering, in
large-scale meta data management, in reducio indexing, in smart
spidering? Where are the geeks who enjoy semantic data modelling
across silos? Or the ones who knows all there is to know about digital
identity management? Things that's actually damn, seriouslly
you'll-all-go-down-in-flames-without-it technologies? Where is it?
Where's the direction you need to make to get to it? Where's your
passionate people who understands all this and wants to see it
through?
I've said it before, and I'll say it again; you need to come up with
something radically different here. You can't beat this with smart,
long-term and slowly adapting techniques you've mastered so well. You
need radical, and radical is *not* library thinking.
Alex
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Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
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Received on Sun Sep 21 2008 - 09:58:55 EDT