Whiny and demanding; rude and arrogant; clueless and uninformed

I'm giving a talk with my fellow librarian Adam Taves in October at Access 
2010 in Winnipeg: "After Launching Search and Discovery, Who Is Mission 
Control?"

Here's the description:

| Reference librarians are whiny and demanding.
| Systems librarians are arrogant and rude.
| Users are clueless and uninformed.
|
| A new discovery layer means that they need to collaborate to
| build it and then the next step integrate it into teaching and
| learning. How should we (reference librarians, systems people,
| and users) work together to better exploit the possibilities
| of open source systems so we can focus on discovery and understanding 
| instead of the mechanics of searching?

At WILU (a Canadian conference about information literacy), Adam asked 
some IL librarians three questions:

  1. What do you want from a search and discovery layer?
  2. What do you want from your systems people?
  3. What should they want from you?

What do systems people want from public services librarians?  And what 
should they want from you?

This subject has been discussed here before, and the issues crop up in all 
kinds of threads, and I'll look through the archives, but all comments are 
most welcome, especially from people that have been through a next-gen 
catalogue/discovery layer implementation---especially if it went very well 
or very badly.


Bill
-- 
William Denton, Toronto : miskatonic.org www.frbr.org openfrbr.org