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Computing, Libraries, Tennis, India & other interests of Vikas Kamat
| Librarians and Programmers |  | | Librarians and Programmers
Dave Winer says he likes making software for librarians (link)
I like making software for users of libraries. I do it for a living.
I work a lot with librarians as well as geeks. Someone(probably a
librarian) somewhere thought, since both librarians and programmers work with
information, they must be related, and must work together. But as my notes based on working with
either, tell you, they are quite different groups that quite don't get along.
- Librarians are typically female, typically are well read, have good English language skills, and typically underpaid. The programmers are typically male, typically have poor writing skills, spell poorly, and are
overpaid.
- There is a tremendous collide of nomenclature. What the humans call a book, the librarians call a monograph. What we call a periodical, they call a serial or a title. A database system for a
geek means a relational database management system, for a librarian it means
a collection of citations. I am not talking about some individual making a
mistake, I am talking about two large white-collar, vertical industries. For
a geek, Oracle is a database. For a librarian, ProQuest is a database.
- Librarians are nit-pickers. They get very frustrated (who doesn't?)
because the programmers won't listen to them. Unfortunately what librarians
don't get is that some of the programmers have sound mathematical
foundations in their brain, and can organize the information much better for
easy retrieval, than the librarians can. The librarians refuse to accept
that programmers get organization of information. Just look at the
LCC Classification
System, which is like holy grail for librarians. Medicine is not under
Science, and Military and Naval Science are in the same hierarchical level as
Music. Categories E and F (History of America) are actually same! How can a
programmer respect these?
- Librarians feel threatened by systems like Google. Their gut feelings
are right. Do you know how many people walk to a library and use Google? And
you know what, Google is pretty darn good at finding what a user (patron)
want whereas a library is not. Just consider how painful it is for a patron
to access the electronic versions of a licensed journals-- first you have to
register your IP, then you have to get a login and password -- a different
one for each of the e-journals the library has subscriptions, it is a
nightmare. No wonder library usage is declining worldwide.
 This is not a criticism of librarians as a profession. If you are
offended, please read some jokes ridiculing the
programmers. IMO a
librarian's job is more honorable than a programmer's, and I say that just
because of my upbringing as a Hindu which gives a lot of credit to the
knowledge professions like teachers, gurus, sages, and librarians  .
See Also:
• My Romance with Libraries
• More Blog Entries on Libraries
| (Comments Disabled for Now. Sorry!) | First Written: Thursday, October 16, 2003
Last Modified: 10/20/2003
Tags: library |
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creating your own start page beats all portals, back-flipping,
personalized corporate pages, and book-marking tools. |
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Vikas Kamat