NOTE: Note that every time I say “most librarians”, I’m actually saying “most librarians I’ve known, met, talked to, or have heard about”… Which is a pretty sizable number.

A local librarian recently wrote an interesting piece about an interesting piece wondering why librarians aren’t system administrators too.

The answer is simple: Most librarians are not technophiles. Most librarians pine for card catalogs and papery books and papercuts and paperclips and all things paper. Most librarians only use technology because they have to in order to keep their job… or their library open at all. And conversely, most system administrators generally want nothing to do with paper, books, or those that herd them.

How many librarians do you know that don’t have a blog, nor participate in online discussions of any kind short of maybe e-mail? How many librarians do you know that use words like “new-fangled” to describe fairly old ideas like blogs, forums, RSS, messaging, etc.? How many librarians do you know that call the IT people (or a tech-savvy librarian) because a link they clicked didn’t work… immediately? How many librarians do you know that cannot use technology effectively, period?

I’m not slamming librarians as a group – I could have substituted “doctors” or “teachers” or “carpenters” in there as well – Just making the point that people that aren’t required to do IT things, don’t generally do IT things (nor want to).

I have a fair number of librarian colleagues that are very tech savvy and could with an few courses in their degree, or 3-4 months of deep training, be very good system administrators. They think logically. They generally want to do what’s best for their userbase. They usually aren’t sticklers for 9-to-5. They generally embrace automating mundane things because they’re generally lazy. Wait… don’t hate me yet: Lazy is good. Lazy means you’re unwilling to settle for doing things you can make some dumb machine do for you. That is why we have the machines, to work for us. That’s an important part of being a system administrator: Being ambitious about being lazy. Example: We have servers find and destroy spam, because we don’t want to weed them out of our inboxes. We cool? Good.

Many years ago, while I was still something resembling an undergraduate, the “automations librarian” at the time was, actually, a systems administrator (he may not agree with that). The library had a CD Server running Windows NT that served … gosh … 15(?) CD’s worth of data to the library workstations. The hours I spent on WilsonDISC alone are… staggering. He and I got along very well (still do, even though he regressed to being a “real” librarian some time ago ) and worked on a number of fairly pioneering initiatives to help enhance the Information Technology on campus.

I actually spelled “IT” out there, because that’s what we’re talking about – Information Technology – the technology to provide information. Sounds exactly like what a modern librarian should be focused on. Most people responsible for libraries don’t see it that way. Most people teaching future librarians don’t see it that way. Most people creating library science curricula don’t see it that way. Ergo, most librarians aren’t that way.

I openly invite any librarian or library science student (or groups of either), from anywhere that can get here, with an interest in system administration, to up-to a full-day of hands-on this-is-the-kind-of-stuff-a-sysadmin-does . Really! I already do this stuff for high schoolers and college students and mid-life-crisis-folk-considering-a-career-change, so why not offer it to librarians too? I’d love to see a revolution of systems-minded librarians taking real ownership for the systems they rely on. It’s good for them, it’s good for IT, and it’s best for the users.

I think I put more italics and hy-ph-ens in this post than anywhere else, ever…. NO CARRIER

1 Comment

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  By Jenica, March 13, 2008 @ 10:06 am

  I’m going to take you up on that offer at some point — you knew that, right?

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