I love reading, always have, and my favorite areas of interest include U.S. military history and Greek and Roman myth. I did NOT get straight As in school, did graduate with honors from HS but fell off a bit in college, mainly cause electrical engineering is quite hard. I am moderately skilled with computers but am no computer scientist by any stretch of the imagination. Popular culture used to interest me (but not the types of popular culture that you all may be thinking of), but now it doesnt AT ALL. Chasing girls is not important to me, chasing dollars is. I am NOT some ugmo, I have been told I am handsome. No, I am not gay. And, um, I run and do abs and weights for exercise and am moderately skilled at the sport of basketball, and can play a little baseball too.

At first, being a graduate student myself, I didn’t question the proposed dichotomy. It made sense to me that genX’ers and those that follow are more open to implementing new tecnologies to reach our patrons. Now that I have had the opportunity to get acquainted with my fellow students, I’m becoming more sceptical that we can define the philosophical difference Rory is trying to bring our attention to. I know students in their 50’s eagerly learning XML and young 20 something students who struggle with basic HTML and avoid learning new technologies as much as they can and still get through school.

Rory is to be commended for attempting to break it down to something we can name, some difference that we can relate to. What we are really talking about here, however, is a difference in how these two “camps”, if we dare to go so far, perceive libraries and their role as librarians.

Libraries have been in competition with every new media technology since we first identified ourselves as librarians. And each step of the way, many of us have felt threatened and feared obsolescence. And while there have been deviations from time to time, while we have adapted, sometimes painfully, to our ever evolving environment, our basic self perceptions of our role as librarians and the role of the library itself have remained nearly constant.

The “geek trend”, represents a disregard for the traditional values of librarianship. It can also be perceived as an emerging trend that is more concerned with information than knowledge. How we present and make accessible the stores of knowledge to our patrons is important, but the underlying philosophy that guides our actions at this point in history may irrevocably change the path of our profession and further diminish our role in the communities we serve. Libraries and Librarians are uniquely situated to mediate and guide citizens on the path from information to knowledge to understanding as far as patrons may wish to travel in pursuing individual interests and personal philosophies. We have so much to lose by pursuing technology for techology’s sake and reacting irrationally to “market” pressures that may or may not have direct bearings on our patronage.

Many of the library students I know are coming from other professions and disciplines. Most of us are attracted to librarianship because we love learning, books, libraries as places, and yes, sharing our passionate love of learning with others. The ongoing trend of merging Library Science programs with Information Science programs is attracting a new breed of folks who want to use information science skills to get a job. I’m not saying that’s evil, most of us need jobs. Salaries for librarians have been on the rise, even as we have been mourning our impending demise. Where formerly, a potential librarian might have said, “Yes, the pay and the benefits are atrocious, but I still want to do this…(because I love it, perhaps left unsaid), we now have people coming into the profession who formerly might have chosen another field like computer science or information managment. Perhaps they are attracted by increasingly liveable wages, or perhaps they couldn’t compete in that larger fish tank, I don’t know. Somehow, though, space must be made in the Library and Information Science curriculums to expose the philosophies behind librarianship to those who don’t natively possess them.

Thank you.

If we weren’t always fighting for the same batch of resources, I think we could all just get along, and avoid the Us vs Them mentality. The idea of turning the library catalog into a Googler’s heaven turns my stomach though. But then, I’m a cataloger who has also done web work, so I can see the good of keywords and subject description.

I was a librarian at the EPA Chemical library, until it was closed down to go “virtual”. I have never had love for modernization for modernization’s sake, and this was enhanced when I saw the contractor reports (which I always got requests for) being thrown in the dumpster.

The claim was that all EPA documents would be digitized in 8 months (SAY WHAT???). I would love to see how anyone is supposed to find anything in that new database, if all they do is scan everything in and enter it by name and EPA number.

And apparently, the considerable money EPA paid the contractors for those reports didn’t qualify them as “EPA documents”!

My work at EPA was a split between web site maintenance/design and normal reference (mostly in web maintenance). It was almost impossible, however, to try to convince the managers that librarians were the perfect people to design their web site. We have organizational skills, information architecture knowledge, and some concept of the people who use the site.

There seems to be this disconnect in people’s thinking: librarians deal with books and old stuff; techies deal with computers and new stuff. The techies, therefore, know best how to arrange this ‘web site’.

I think it is because many people (especially in administration) don’t understand computers more than they have to. To them, what web designers do is magic and instantaneous. They don’t understand the work and planning involved. (And I’m probably rambling in just the way you don’t like, Rory!)

My new job (traditional cataloger) is at another federal agency, and I’m finding a similar problem with regards to trying to pry money from those who control it. Many of our users, mostly scientists and managers directly above us, know our worth. They know what we can do for them, and they are grateful. But they don’t control the money.

That is handled by administrators who never visit the library, don’t have any need for a library (they think!), believe libraries are unnecessary (except for prestige purposes) since everything you need is online, and only see the line-item cost of the library services. These, in my opinion, are the real enemy, the managers who don’t think they need us.

And the disconnect between the librarians and the good they could do as web designers and consultants is still here too.

(Should we band together in a war against the budget people and managers?)

It’s almost as if everyone follows the geeks except the nerds.

I like being a nerd better though.

only thing is I’m not a bad dancer and I’m pretty good at the more physical (violent) sports.

but I’m so nerdy I haven’t tried to get a girlfriend yet, but those geeky chicks can’t keep their hands off me…too bad they’re disgusting.

and yet after saying all this i realize i am a hopeless *nerd*.

I have something to offer that will, probably, enrich your search.

My webliography is on Librarians and Techies – A NEXUS.

Further, to sustain the image of the librarianship I maintain a blog on information visualization. The aim of this blog is to identify Innovative Practices to Connect Every Book, Its Reader and in the ultimate sense lead towards emergence of visual catalogs in libraries.

As a multifaith blogger, I hope this soul searching spree helps re-vitalize the ship of librarians.

I also have a strong lay interest the Natural Sciences…grew up watching COSMOS; I really very much enjoyed High School chemistry but was too intimidated to take it in college, so I took biology to meet my science requirements in College.

I’m trying, bit by bit, to learn more about information technology and how to use it and make myself more “marketable”, as I think my NERD background is a hard sell in the contemporary LIS jobsearch. I’d say there’s probably too many well educated humanists out there competing for too few positions, and the technology edge can really set one apart from the pack, to the point that you can even be less humanistically savvy than average but still make up for it with concrete technology know-how. Those that truly are able to sit in both camps (systems + other library work, either Reference or Tech Services) are in the best position to be in.

At EndUser 2006 I sat in on sessions on WebVoyage, which is the web-server software that actually generates the OPAC display everyone sees on the web. It wasn’t my direct area of responsibility, but it was fascinating. A little intimidating, but some of the general concepts reminded me a little of what I learned doing BASIC programming on my old Apple II+ eons ago.

At my last library job, the focus was all on e-resources, especially e-journals, and given the sci/tech nature of the campus, entirely appropriate; but I felt there was so very much emphasis on these materials that the physical book collection was being outright neglected, so I engaged in a little collection development work to enhance the collection, especially updating out-of-date materials and trying to “internationalize” the perspective of our collection a bit more. 100% nerd work. I got several compliments on my book selections, which made me beam with pride. But I also enjoyed fiddling around with getting our NetLibrary records to display correctly in our OPAC, which was a taste of Geekdom. But my Nerd qualities were also at work in looking at the kinds of NetLibrary records we were going to be getting via our main campus…and really questioning some of the relevance of much of the material, vis a vis our more narrowly focused curriculum; do we add these records “just because”, or because they really do meet the information needs of our campus and might actually get used…

Thanks again for the food for thought, Rory; I always enjoy your essays!

Well… besides the fact that I’m not attempting to create a dichotomy in a serious way but am trying to say something tongue in cheek, I think my responses to people who are saying the same thing as you explain my position as well as I can at the moment. Beyond that, I think I’ll just have to try to articulate myself better in future postings on the subject.

Did you read the articles from Progressive Librarian in my follow-up post? I think they say something important.