Note: thanks to a worried comment from an FRL reader, I discovered several hundred FRL readers had been marooned when I migrated to WordPress a couple of weeks ago. I pointed the feed in question to the new WordPress rss2 feed. Tell me if you aren’t reading this 😉
I felt completely back in the game in yesterday’s SEFLIN talk. It was a fun, lively, engaging, challenging group, and I was doing what I usually do, which is try to plow through about 50 percent more information than can be humanly transmitted in a presentation timeframe while hopping around and waving my arms. Plus, I was wearing my favorite blue floral skirt that I had bought at an Ann Taylor outlet in Destin for an insanely low price, no less. Can life get better?
One brief aside has stayed with me. The SEFLIN board members were talking about how staff such as programmers are “up” on technology. When I’m in presentation overdrive I’m at my most unfiltered, so I quickly observed that quite often, systems people and programmers were behind–sometimes very far behind–on social software awareness and adoption. I added what I have thought for some time, which is that LITA, the “geek” division of ALA, has lagged behind divisions such as ACRL, PLA, and RUSA in moving to online learning, podcasting, and blogging. They nodded, and I went on, but that small exchange stayed with me and resonates today.
To non-tech-types, there is one flavor of techy, much as to non-librarians we’re all the same. (Wears an apple necklace: works with kids. Cat earrings: works with adults.) Yet within LibraryLand, there are as many flavors of technology as there are librarians. There are the librarians for whom work life revolves around the inner workings of the library catalog software; there are librarians who label themselves as “geeks” even though they may never script, see a shell prompt, or twiddle with code of any kind. There are deep-into-the-OS hardware people; there are hands-on hardware types, such as Jessamyn installing Ubuntu on donated computers; there are librarians who don’t know the difference between Java and Javascript, and librarians who dream in Java. There are librarians who know the inner workings of every single social software known to the free world, and librarians who have memorized the Windows registry but think instant messaging is for little kids.
Are we one group? Are we all from the same cloth? I’d like to think so. The walls of misunderstanding are strong, but not as strong as the ties that bind.
Posted on this day, other years:
- Yoohoo, U.S. News... - 2005
- Reader's Advisory: Says Who? - 2004
I’ve been thinking about this exact topic a lot lately. Tomorrow is my six month anniversary at my job, which I took over from a very different flavor of library techie. It’s been interesting to watch everyone around me adjust to the change. Only in IT would they have to adjust to me just as much as I have to adjust to a new organizational culture.
I can code a little bit. Sometimes. In some languages. My family is convinced that this means I can create the next MySpace. Yeah, that’s my retirement plan. Demonstrations help. The difference between my sites and MySpace is obvious even to Internet neophytes.
But I think librarians generally get that there are a lot of different tech flavors. Maybe not the specifics, but my coworkers see how each person in IT has different strengths and interests and they know I talk to IT people at other libraries all the time. The ties that bind are critical in libraries- most of us are one or two person shops and we can’t be every type of geek, so we have to talk to the people who can fill in our gaps.
By the way,
“Wears an apple necklace: works with kids. Cat earrings: works with adults.”
Brilliant!
I know just what you mean about your family. I have had to explain until I’m hoarse while I can’t just whip up the church website and why I propose we put it in WordPress. That’s because I have zero design sense and know HTML and CSS the way I know, say, the neighbor I met three months ago walking the dog.
On libraries, don’t be too sure your librarian peers always ‘get’ what your skills are.
I’m with you on the zero design sense. I loved the idea of putting the church site in WordPress and got really excited about the events calendar tool you used.
Let me clarify- I’m not at all sure that librarians get which skills are which at all. I completely agree with you about this. I meant that in a minor way, there’s a wider awareness that the person who comes to fix your broken machine doesn’t have the same skill set as the people who make, say, search engines. It’s tiny, but I’ll take what I can get.
I agree with Kate about the necklaces! In fact, I can see an entire Librarian Identification Guide coming out of this.
Work in both adult and children services? Apple earrings and cat necklace.
Work in Special Needs? Flashing LED necklace
I think you’ve got something salable here.
Carrying Laptop to meeting? Techie Librarian
Sensitive, progressive male librarian: one earring
Hey! I resemble that remark!
Sports jacket, Dockers, Rockports: male library admin
When are you publishing your Librarian Identification Guide? I want to reserve a copy!
Always has food out for everyone: Technical Services.
Kate, re tech services: yes! And a cake for every occasion!
Red power suit, chunky gold earrings: female urban library director
Karen, you just made me laugh *way* too loudly at the reference desk. I’m going to have to shush myself.
true to form, i’m the IT librarian and I wear far too much black. I am wearing a green shirt in a nod to spring today, but black skirt and black (oh yes) cardigan.