Somewhat less accidental systems librarianship

There’s a discussion getting started in the biblioblogosphere that is near and dear to my library student heart, and I’m glad to be listening in.

Dorothea Salo kicked off with her post Naturalizing Systems Librarians.

Jenica Rogers-Urbanek, Michelle Boule, and Meredith Farkas all responded. I hope they keep talking, because this comes as great encouragement to a library student looking at the gap between here and there and getting ready to jump across. I’m excited by the job listings I now see that require web dev. skills along with instructional skills, XML know-how along with cataloging know-how. I’m also gearing up to learn as much as I can to get myself ready for those jobs, and often finding it a frustrating process. And, other than a curriculum that tries to pretend technology hasn’t happened, my biggest enemy has often been myself. Before I know it, when I don’t understand why the Apache server I’m trying to configure isn’t doing anything or why my fonts are all wonky after I’ve attached the CSS file, I have sometimes ended up saying to myself what I cringe when other people say: “I’m just a librarian.” It’s a common line, sometimes delivered humbly, sometimes defensively, sometimes arrogantly (go figure). All of these deliveries hurt us when we say them to others and worse say them to ourselves. But I have learned to remind myself that there’s no “just” about it. Not in the world I want to work in.

I’m encouraged to hear librarians saying that it is not only possible but necessary for librarians who never expected to be hackers to get a working skill set. I’m also encouraged by their personal stories of having no structured opportunity to do this in library school but being able to learn it as they went along nonetheless. The learning process they describe–play until it breaks and then learn to fix, copy and paste as much as you can and then learn what you can’t, think about what you actually need to know to serve your library and then find a way to get it–is very much like the one I’ve been using and hope to use much more in the future. I can do that. I won’t be perfect and I may not be fast, but I can put my head down and keep trying. And that’s a good thing, I guess, b/c that is not only what I want to do in my library career, it’s what I might find myself doing regardless.

I was particularly interested in Meredith’s questions here:

“What does knowledge of 2.0 tools mean? You have a blog? You read blogs? You edited the Wikipedia? You have a Facebook profile? It’s important for librarians to keep up with the hot technologies, but does it make someone a techie? No. Can you install MediaWiki software on a server? Have you moved blog content from one software to another (say Moveable Type to WordPress)? What do you do when your blog or wiki’s database becomes corrupted? What mechanisms would you use to prevent spam on a blog or wiki? Can you customize our blog or wiki to look like the rest of our website?”

So, with that said, I’m trying to come up with a desiderata for what I should try to put in my own skill bucket. The list right now is:

• learn much more about servers and how you maintain them
• work through that Python book I keep checking out
• get some server space somewhere so I can learn how to install, tweak, and migrate content into my own WordPress
• learn how to build a database-driven website
• slurp as much alphabet soup as I can stomach: PHP, SQL, Java, Perl, and whatever else is floating around in those job postings

The next question is, how to do this effectively and in a way that might demonstrate that i have these skills to others? I’m keeping an eye out for student-discounted education opps via ACRL and projects that I could volunteer for that I can justify learning these things for. I’m also investigating the tech training education options that my school sponsors–seems like there used to be quite an extensive list of self-paced courses you could access. In the meanwhile, I’m lucky to be working at a library with more tech books that I could ever need, so spending my own money that server space might be the impetus I need to stop browsing and start coding or copying or whatever it is I determine I need to do.