Discussion
What makes the job of librarians hard to understand is because if they do their job well, it becomes almost invisible. But the absence of what librarians do can be found because:
- information is hard to locate
- information is often out of date or conflicting
- information is outright missing
To me it's the other side of digital infrastructure, complementing what ops folks do.
@yosh this is also why I feel like Google’s stated mission of “Organizing the World’s Information” feels particularly barbed lately
What makes the job of librarians hard to understand is because if they do their job well, it becomes almost invisible. But the absence of what librarians do can be found because:
- information is hard to locate
- information is often out of date or conflicting
- information is outright missing
To me it's the other side of digital infrastructure, complementing what ops folks do.
@yosh At my most recent workplace I spent pushing a decade and a half building out infrastructure that took us from three janky servers and a repurposed storefront on High to a global platform that was consistently cooking up about half a billion dollars in ARR. It was a hell of a story, one I'll recount some day. In the course of doing this, obviously a *lot* of information was generated as things evolved, changed, and grew.
Towards the last three or four years there I found that the most impactful thing I could do as a hypersenior engineer was... make sure smart people had good information. I could crank out solutions to problems all day every day, and I did.
But when it came time to really leave a mark what mattered was making what people needed to know—especially when they didn't know they needed to know it—accessible and correct.
Long story short, the best engineering I ever did over a very long career was... being a mediocre librarian.
@yosh I remember part of my internship when I was at university was in the Information Management Department at a corporate and our sub department was the business information unit. This was at the end of the century.
Basically a library. If folks needed specific information we'd find it and order it out of central storage.
But part of our remit was explaining to people where to put their documents in our shared file systems etc.
I feel like in the quest for big data we lost those skills.
@yosh Thank you for this.
I'm now convinced, one of my personal projects that's having major issues ... ultimately I need to find a librarian who wants to collaborate.
I do systems. Ops work. Nuts and bolts, etc. I don't know how to organize information, and that project is struggling - because ultimately it's project about organizing information.
@yosh Couldn’t agree more. Having worked for years with academic librarians, their expertise is not in filing books, but in the really deep problems of information access, management, discoverability, and sharing.
These are core knowledge sharing topics in any organisation (and between organisations, within a shared community), and librarians have literally thousands of years of professional expertise in solving them.
Tech could learn a lot from them.
@yosh This is absolutely true. And not just because I said as much many times during my career in libraries!
It may even have been doubly true for me because I worked in technical services, the "behind the scenes" stuff, rather than out at the reference desk. Even the reference librarians didn't know how we went about creating the online catalog they used to find stuff for researchers.
@yosh When $old_job made someone the "librarian" of something, that meant not only documenting, but knowing everything about it, keeping current, updating documentation as changes occurred, and actually literally being what a librarian does. Becoming the librarian of a thing was either months of research if it was planned or years of expertise if it was simply formalized. My old manager really did get it.
People do not appreciate that librarians have a whole library science degree. It's not just a part-time job for grannies. I have mad respect for librarians.
@bluestarultor @yosh i sat in on an archival science course my friend was taking at umich for their master's and it was so deliriously interesting i started asking so many questions the prof was like oh i haven't seen you before and i had to admit that yes i was an interloper
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