We libraries specially focus on organizing information and helping
people find information from amongst the entire universe of published
information (or at least printed information, and a large part of the
universe of electronically published information--we're still working it
out).
I agree with Tomasz that this mission means that, indeed we need people
who understand both libraries and technology. Do we need 'librarian
coders'? I think so, being one, but at a minimum, as I've said before,
we need people who understand and are committed to libraries and also
understand how to manage technology, evaluate technology, write
technological requirements, project manage technological projects, and
understand where technology is appropriately used.
Do newspapers need this? I don't know, I'll leave that to them (and I
suspect that many of them in fact DO if they want to survive), but I
agree with Tomasz that libraries by their very mission are _intimately_
involved in information technology in a qualitatively different way than
even newspapers.
Can one reasonably disagree with this, and think that libraries in fact
don't need any special technological expertise, or any more than they do
now? Sure, and apparently most of our administrators do.
Do libraries need vendor-provided technology that "just works"? Of
course. Do we have it? No. There are lots of things we can say about
why not, and many of us have written on that extensively before, but I
really don't think it's because libraries have _too many_ people who are
experts in technology and in libraries. Because, well, we don't. In
fact, I'd suggest that having more of those people would allow libraries
to have more reasonable expectations of what our vendors should give us,
and to reward those who do and punish those who don't with our business
(or lack thereof). Something we are not doing very well right now. And
it's not because we have too many people who think libraries have a
special relationship to information technology.
Jonathan
Tim Spalding wrote:
> 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
>
>
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Received on Wed Sep 24 2008 - 12:27:00 EDT