On Systems Librarianship
Jan 10th, 2005 by Aaron Louie
It’s been nearly 3 months since I started this blog, and I haven’t really talked about Systems Librarianship — or anything librarian-ish, for that matter — nearly enough. This is mostly due to the nature of the work I’ve been doing recently, which has involved installing and testing and debugging web applications. It’s time to take a step back and look at what it all means.
As I sit here in my office staring at the whiteboard, which is covered with diagrams and flowcharts hastily drawn to illustrate the flow of information from user to system to system and back again, I reflect on why this job exists at all. Why do we need librarians in IT departments anyway? Shouldn’t the librarians focus on reference and classification and selection and all those other bookish concerns? And shouldn’t computer support personnel just stay in their fortress of circuit boards and techno-jargon, honing their 1337 h4×0rz sk1ll5 and preventing the script kiddies and cyber terrorists from taking down the network?
Well, in answer to these questions, I offer the following illustration from this Sunday’s Dilbert: http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert20050101046179.jpg
Notice that, in this comic, the IT department is presented as sadistic and needlessly legalistic, a stereotypical portrayal of the stereotypical computer support department. The reasoning behind the confiscation of “non-standard” equipment is that, in order to save money and staff time, the organization can only support a limited range of technology. Every boutique piece of hardware or software adds yet another expense, yet another line item, yet another headache on top of the already thin budget and overloaded schedule tech departments must handle. Such a perspective is technology and cost-centric. And everyone knows the bottom line — especially in libraries — is king. Right?
Well, let’s look at the stereotypical portrayal of librarians: maternal, dour, overly-educated-yet-technologically-challenged protectors of arcane knowledge. I have met several librarians who, at first glance, fit this description perfectly. However, being a librarian, I know that even the most stereotypical librarians care deeply about helping and educating the public. Yes, we are keepers of the sacred word, but we’re here to assist real people in finding real answers to real questions. We are user-centric.
So what happens when you have a library, full of librarians and library staff, that also happens to be full of computers — public terminals, staff workstations, printers, scanners, catalog servers, web servers, application servers, file servers, backup servers, database servers, print servers, routers, switches, wireless access points, etc. etc. etc.? You get an IT department to manage all that technology on a shoestring budget. You get aging reference librarians who are 5 years from retirement being asked all manner of tech support questions by patrons. You get stereotyped user-centric librarians criticising stereotyped computer geeks for being technology-centric and budget-conscious. You get civil war.
UNLESS… this is the point of this whole spiel… unless you have Systems Librarians there to fill the gap between users and technology, between the IT department and the librarians. They bridge that crucial disconnect, providing the user-centered perspective to the bit checkers and bean counters while keeping the limitations and challenges of technology management in mind.
Systems Librarians are bilingual, translating techno-jargon into natural language and back again; they are cyborgs, chimaeras, the moderators between the binary of circuitry and the poetry of meat. They are catalysts of change. IT Librarians bring a holistic perspective of the operation of the library to every interaction and can see possibilities for improvement where non-technical library staff or non-librarian technical staff would see only barriers and the fog of indecipherable complexity.
Thus, if I often switch abruptly in this blog between apparently disparate topics such as LDAP and library committee formation, know that it’s just part of my job as a Systems Librarian. I’m just exercising my babelfish.