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Vikas Kamat
 Vikas Kamat is a programmer- entrepreneur living in Atlanta. This blog is a complex mix of Indian culture, life in southern USA, computer sciences, and sports. Opinions are his own.
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Computing, Libraries, Tennis, India & other interests of Vikas Kamat

Librarians and Programmers Durable Link to this BLOG
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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