A little item on Slashdot today touched on something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.
Their take: Web 2.0 may be a threat to IT job security. (Interesting comments on this!)
My take: Web 2.0 empowers folks to get many jobs done themselves “without involving IT.”
It’s something I think about every time I hear someone in a library talking about “giving that to the tech guy” when it comes to posting something to the Web site, blog, wiki, whatever.
These technologies are designed to be easy to use, learn, and maintain. But we’re so used to giving the assignment to the “person who handles that,” that I often see librarians who could have done the job themselves in about two minutes playing the handoff game - which starts to add up to days and weeks of waiting for the task to get done.
Yes, we’re all busy. Yes, we should be able to delegate duties as necessary. Yes, the library’s “tech guy” is very important to it’s survival and shouldn’t be ushered out the door (please no! We need you!!!) But we’re very lucky to have access to great technologies and resources that give us the power to stop relying so much on other people when it comes to using technology.
We don’t need a specialized person to handle everything remotely connected to a computer. We can do it ourselves. We don’t have to wait. We can put our professional skills to use in designing and maintaining many of our services without a middleman.
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October 30th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
Hooray, hip hip hooray to you! Like Joyce Valenza, who says, Lead from the middle.” (Don’t know if she said it first, but it’s where I heard it.)
In my workspace (a school library) a DIY attitude is very helpful. If you rely totally on the established structure, your inspiraations migt never lift off the idea table. I’m perfectly happy to leave the hardware and networking to the experts, just as I don’t fix the electrical system, but for creation of projects of whatever kinds, there’s so many easy tools out there.
I guess it’s time to get back to blogging about my library. But I’m also going over to a wiki for my library page, and giving up on webpage design and hosting situation. You just DO it, as long as you do it in a style that doesn’t offend the institution.
October 30th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Yes! Though it’s also true that some “library tech guys”/IT departments are very reluctant to allow librarians to do things for themselves. I am finding myself having to submit things to “tech guys” that I could do myself, but that I’m not (yet) permitted to do–as I know many others in my system are.
October 31st, 2007 at 9:29 am
As the “IT guy” I applaud your ideas on how it “should” be. You are 100% correct that the little things that you can do in 2 or 3 minutes, end up taking me 2 or 3 days to get to. Yes, I could do it just as fast but, there are priorities to what I do. “Let’s see….do I get this pc working for a patron or empty this trash can, or ………………….” I have a LOOOONG list of things I would like to do for our patrons (& staff) but, I often end up playing fireman. Flash fires happen at the most inconvenient times.
October 31st, 2007 at 9:54 am
Dan- I completely understand! I was afraid someone would misconstrue this post and think I was coming down on IT folks. I’m totally not. You have other things to do than edit my wiki.