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Lets look at gender in Library IT

So. Let’s talk about library technology organizations and gender. I attended LitaForum 2015 last year, and like many good attendees, I tweeted thoughts as I went. Far more popular in the Twitterverse than anything original I sent out was a simple summary of a slide in a presentation by Angi Faiks, “Girls in Tech: A gateway to diversifying the library workforce.” The tweet in question was: That this struck a chord is shocking, presumably, to no one. The slide that prompted my tweet references a 2009 article by Melissa Lamont that (a) you should read, and (b) briefly presents (among other interesting data) numbers from the 2014-2015 ARL Annual Salary Survey (paywalled). What is the problem symptom? Given the popularity of the tweet, I thought I’d dig a little deeper and see what I could find out about Library IT and gender, with the expectation that it would be pretty…

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There’s a Reason There’s a Specialized Degree

I think it can be easy to look around a library — especially a smooth-running one — and forget that the work that gets done there ranges from the merely difficult to the incredibly complex. This isn’t the sort of stuff just anyone can do, no matter how well-meaning and interested they might be, which is why there are specialized degree programs designed to turn out inventive and effective experts. I’m talking, of course, about the accountants. And computer programmers. And instructional designers. And usability experts. And, oh, yeah, the librarians. A double standard? There’s a temptation among librarians (and programmers too, of course, and an awful lot of professors) to think that the world consists of two types of work: Stuff only we can do, and Everything else If I were to head off to a library school for a semester and take a single course on cataloging, my…