Sarah Houghton-Jan has had it, and I don’t blame her. Reading Meredith’s post about EBSCOs shady dealings just made be gnash my teeth again and wish that there was a decent way we could let our vendors know that sure we’d like to continue relationships with them, but they have to start giving us genuine options — good tools, decent prices, respectable service — instead of just assuming that they’ll always have a library market.
Meredith Farkas spells it out. Cogent, readable and clear. The tech stuff we need to know isn’t how to make a blockquote in HTML, we have buttons and software for that. The tech stuff we need is big picture stuff, how to solve the problems that are different than the problems that came before them.
So what skills should new librarians have in this first part of the 21st century? At first, I was thinking about specific tech skills like HTML, network administration, PHP and MySQL, etc. While those are certainly important, what I really think library schools aren’t teaching students is the “big picture” topics; how to really be able to keep up with technology, make good decisions about its implementation, use it and sell it to others. Here are a few of the things I came up with.
Hi. My name is Jessamyn West and I'll be your librarian today. I work in rural Vermont as a library technologist and am a community manager at MetaFilter.com. My personal blog is at jessamyn.com. This blog's twitter feed @librarian.net. Feel free to contact me if you have questions or comments.
