How To Think About Technology "We have two choices. We can watch technologies come down the stream and pluck out the ones we think valuable. The questions I pose here can help in making those kinds of decisions, and this is necessary and important work. Or we can, as a profession, decide that it is better to be further upstream, engaged with the people who are thinking up new technological goodies and be a part of that process to influence their design and development. I'd rather be upstream. Our presence in the development process would undoubtedly help to produce things that are more helpful not only to us but in general." [at Library Journal, via NewBreed Librarian]
I would rather be upstream, too, which is one reason I started this blog. I want to prove to vendors, especially those outside of libraryland, that they should be working with us, not ignoring us. I read an interesting interview with Jane Margolis about Computer Science's Gender Gap in which she says we need women in CS for the perspectives and testing we bring to development. She illustrates this point using examples of flawed products that were developed by all-male teams.
I'd make a parallel argument for the need to integrate librarians and libraries into the IT world. There's the obvious taxonomy and organization issues, but another good example of the alternate perspective we could provide comes from a web design mailing list I'm on. It's comprised mostly of techie web designers. It's a great list, but they all seem to think that everyone should run their 19-21" monitors at a resolution of 1024 x 768, surf with browsers that are not maximized, using the latest and greatest browsers, and on a high-speed Internet connection. They just don't understand how the rest of the world really views and uses the Web. I think they would be very surprised to see how patrons use the Web in libraries. They desperately need an alternate perspective.
One last thought about the LJ article: it says one question to ask yourself is "does it feel right?" It's a good question, but sometimes you don't know the answer. Not knowing or not being sure feels wrong, but sometimes you have to get yourself past that uncertainty and take a chance. Failure is better than not even trying.
8:52:42 PM 
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