Fine, let's do an information industry. There are companies that
specialize in financial information, or government information. There
are newspapers and publishers. And so forth.
Are there IT people who work in these industries? Certainly. But is
there a class of newspaper coders? Publisher coders? Of course not. Do
newspaper types bemoan the lack of reporters with programming skills?
Of course not! Is the whole technical landscape at a publisher
constrained by highly specialized, over-engineered solutions? No. They
mostly use common IT tools.
In the rest of the modern information universe, this stuff just
*works*. You buy and use industry-standard tools, separate the
specialized task from the standard software and standards that
implements it. Meanwhile:
*Only libraries exchange information through Z39.50. Everyone else
uses HTTP and, if they ever encounter it, wonder what the hell
libraries are thinking.
*Only libraries have their own private format for books, the many
flavors of MARC. (ONIX is annoying, but at least it's XML!)
*Only libraries pay through the nose for special proprietary database
systems (ILSes) they often can't even access programmatically.
I'm very much in favor of libraries doing IT internally, as long as
they understand they're doing *IT*. So long as they think they're
doing some special "Library IT," they'll keep falling behind—and being
preyed on by the external vendors willing to facilitate and perpetuate
the dysfunction.
Tim
Received on Wed Sep 24 2008 - 11:34:10 EDT