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…
Author: Bill Dueber
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…
Dates: Or, the Continuing Frustration of Unnecessarily Ambiguous Metadata
The MARC data structure, and the AACR2 rules that usually accompany it, are strange beasts. Every once in a while I’m asked why I get so frustrated with them, and I explain that there are things — strange things — that I have to deal with by writing lots of code when I could be spending my time trying to improve relevancy ranking or extending the reporting tools my librarians use to make decisions that affect patrons and their access. This is one of those tales. I’m a systems librarian, which in my case means that I deal with MARC metadata pretty much all day, every day. Coming from outside the library world, it took me a while to appreciate the MARC format and how we store data in it, where appreciate can be read as hate hate hate hate hate. I find it frustrating to deal with data…