Michael also mentioned a talk that Jenny gave at CiL during the Dead and Emerging Technologies section. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, yes if your patrons are clamoring for it and your library can support it, things like wireless, RSSfeeds and roving reference librarians are must-haves. On the other hand, I look at our library with our 15 public access terminals that we can just barely maintain, our lack of any technology plan and the levels of connectivity of our patrons generally and I wonder how we get from here to there? And how much our desire for the shiny parts of these technologies led us into a system that we can’t handle, and that leads us to give bad service to patrons? And I wonder how much of this change should be foisted on patrons and how much of it should be patron-driven or at least patron-focused? I have no good answers, and I’m happy that people are really pushing the envelope of using the technology to bring the best parts of libraries to the public. On the other hand, I’m acutely aware that small and rural libraries have to make very tough choices when they decide how to spend their limited money — Vermont libraries get next to no state funding for the public library system — and I’d like to see more of a focus on appropriate technologies rather than new-technologies-at-any-cost-in-any-situation boosterism. I guess that’s my job.
Category: ‘puters
where does it break down?
One of my particular skills that isn’t necessarily library related is being able to analyze systems and see where their weak points are. This can make me a bit of a pest around work [“well what happens if your plan doesn’t work as expected… what is the Plan B?“] but I like to think that the stuff I design is more fault-tolerant than the average stuff. In the reference world, this is the difference between giving someone an answer versus a good answer versus “I don’t know” as an answer. It can be tough to measure the cost of failure in this example, but it’s not as tough in other situations. Susan Feldman talks about the high cost of not finding information.
What we can’t do is measure the increase in creativity and original thinking that might be unleashed if knowledge workers had more time to think and were not frustrated with floundering around online…. Information disasters are caused not by lack of information, but rather by not connecting the right information to the right people at the right time.[lisnews]
komputer kog, or “I got an MLIS for this?”
Speaking of my job, I would like to chime in with a hearty “hear hear!” to this sentiment.
”Research-related issues are within our job parameters,” said [librarian] Nevin Gussack… “Signing people up and making up numbers [to log on], as a professional, is kind of demeaning. I don’t like being a disciplinarian. I like being the purveyor of information. I would rather teach than be a policeman.”
geeks + librarians = ?
I have always wondered if you can make geeks and librarians happy at the same time. At my library the answer is “not yet” but that may change, hopefully before my contract expires. Kendall Clark has a new article about classifiying one’s personal collections in his series “Hacking the Library”.
“If you’re like me, you will never live the pure, weightless all-digital media lifestyle. Our media collections weren’t born digital.”[lisnews]
core competencies for librarians
I love lists. These lists are great: The Top Ten Things a new Sci/Tech Librarian Should Know. I am sorry I missed this in Toronto.
9. You might get a lot of colds (working with the public).
10. You won’t be expected to do everything you promised in the interview.
11. Your colleagues are just as clueless or insecure as you are.
10. You won’t be expected to do everything you promised in the interview.
11. Your colleagues are just as clueless or insecure as you are.