librarians and technologists

I'm not going to say a word, as others are eloquent on this topic:

This illustrates the one item that we cannot put on our Emerging Tech suggestion list, a programmer.  Clearly, one of the major divisions that now separates libraries is whether or not they can bring a programmer on board -- this will be what divides libraries in the next few years.  The Blybergs and Bissons and Vielmettis of the library world are the newest must-haves, and perhaps they are the new revolutionary technology.

LibraryCrunch - Evolutionary Technology and the Emerging Divide

“More attention is given to librarians’ needs than the needs of those who work intensively with the ILS.” In other words, the tech staff. Libraries have been incredibly reticent when it comes to letting technical people make the technical decisions. The result? Vendors who are given laundry lists of nonsense by folks who really don’t know what they’re asking for.

...

Libraries should be listening to their IT departments and vetting requests through them. If you don’t have an IT staff, then a part of the solution is reevaluating your staffing needs so that you have some technical people on-board–this can be as simple as canvasing your existing staff, looking for someone who wants to make the move into geekdom. I believe that a coder-on-board sign is simply a characteristic of most 21st century libraries–it’s not enough to employ the best librarians you can find, you need to get passionate, interested techies as well. Ideally, library schools ought to be considering the merits of a CS track. Courses need to be developed that synthesize coding skills with library science. The more technical know-how that is mixed in to their customer-base, the better chance vendors have at getting sensible feature-requests.

blyberg.net - The Rime of the Ancient ILS

UPDATE: why Johnny Librarian can't code, via librarian.net

Previously:
February 25, 2006  the new library - can it provide new technology-based services?