It is quite common for those who work within the library and archival professions to get caught up in the never ending twists and turns of technology. This particularly happens to those who are new to the profession. For instance, I can remember quite fondly of my graduate work at Wayne State University where I was absolutely convinced that librarians and archivists must not only understand programming, but they must also strive to do as much of their own programming as possible. Naivety is a wonderful thing, especially when you awake from it.
After more than ten years of professional experience, I’ve learned a great deal about librarianship as well as technology; moreover, these lessons have open my eyes to the various ways to approach the challenges of organizing, managing and disseminating content. In addition, it goes without saying, during this time technology has quickly evolved and changed in new and unexpected ways. While I’m no longer such a staunch proponent of librarians and archivists as programmers, I still hold on to a strong notion that librarians and archivists must become intimate with the tools within which they use. But this is nothing new, for librarians and archivists have always had a strong relationship with the tools and materials with which we’ve used. Not surprisingly the change has come from the types of tools and ways in which we use them.
This perspective can best be illustrated in my changing view of librarianship and programming. Over the past 10 years we’ve witnessed an explosion of new tools which are able to leverage the ubiquitous nature of the web. We now have at our finger tips scripting languages, JAVA, XHTML, XML, along with improved tools for the creation of relational databases, MS Access, File Maker, etc. These tools all allow us different means of presenting, organizing and delivering materials. No longer are we restricted to the expertise of others. Now, today, librarians and archivists have the ability of not only learning, but mastering tools, which build on our professional training. In other words, our understanding of classification and its principles provide us with the intellectual skill set useful in the designing and development of web accessible collections.
Moreover, our training as librarians and archivists provides us with something else when we come to the table of problem solving. Our training and skill set allows us to not only understand the tool, but allows us the ability to think through the problem. Rather then relying on the programmer or the skills found in one set of tools, we think of how to achieve the goals. That is, if we have to migrate data from one system to the next then we contemplate how best to do it, while maintaining the data integrity and efficiency of our efforts. We understand that we’ll have to sacrifice one, usually the efficiency of our efforts, for another, the integrity of the data.
No, I was wrong as a budding librarian, we didn’t need to become programmers. Rather we needed to build on our intellectual skills as librarians and archivists and wait for the tools to come to us.
