Stephen Meyer, a library student at the other UW has chimed in on the subject of technology and librarianship. I think he missed the point of what I was trying to say, and that's probably because I said it badly. I guess they and I are talking about two different things, and I need to make that more explicit.
Dorothea and Stephen are talking about whether librarians and technologists like each other (and apparently this differs in academia and in the working world, which is no surprise really). As far as that goes, I'm with Stephen, but my real point is that the reason they don't get along very well is that they simply don't understand each other.
Librarianship and technology are vastly different skill sets, and I believe that it simply is not possible to know everything about both. Heck, it isn't even possible to know everything about librarianship, or everything about computers! Both are incredibly complex fields with their own brands of über-geekery. Let's do a little comparison of the knowledge and values of each:
- Librarianship (and information science):
- Information behavior (user studies)
- Knowledge organization, including but not limited to cataloging, classification, and indexing
- Reference and searching
- Instruction
- Collection development
- Intellectual property, privacy, freedom, and other philosophical and societal issues
- Public access to information
- User interfaces
- Technology:
- Hardware
- Software
- Programming languages
- Data constructs
- Networking
- ???
There — and I'm not even that much of a technologist. I prove my own argument! I simply don't know what all is on the other side, though I know enough to talk to the computer geeks and find out. That's why I'm a systems librarian. Good systems librarians are people like me and Dorothea, who can speak to both sides. We can pull in people from the whole spectrum, card-file librarians and database programmers alike.
Whether they want to talk to each other or not, librarians and computer people need a translator. They simply don't speak the same language.
pjm says:
You'll find this is true of a lot of fields. I found it (and am still finding it) in publishing.
Technology will probably always need translators. I actually find this a bit reassuring, since I can imagine making a career out of it.
Jim says:
"Technology will probably always need translators."
It's hardly limited to technology. As just one example, when I was Assistant Music Director for a ballet, I discovered that one of my important roles (for which no one had planned, but luckily within my capabilities) was translating between the dancers and the rehearsal pianist:
Choreographer: "Start 3 beats before the men's entrance in the hornpipe scene."
Pianist: "HUH?"
Me: "Second time through the B part, second stave, page 5."
Pianist: "Are you sure?"
Me: "Trust me. (You have anybody else to ask?)"
It worked. :-)
Caveat Lector says:
Yes, it matters
Three-cornered convo going on between me, Stephen, and Laurabelle on librarians and technology. I wouldn’t even call it a disagreement, as we’re all basically on the same page here. I do disagree with Stephen that it doesn’t matter, t...