John’s Eight Laws of Library Technology

Greetings. I have worked in the information technology industry for over a decade, mostly as a web developer for IBM. One day I was in my local library, looking at the library OPAC, thinking, ‘Why isn’t this more like Amazon?’ That thought took me to library school. It turns out librarians were thinking the same thing, and they are busy reinventing the OPAC. To my surprise, what I learned at library school was that I was less interested in library technology than librarianship. I have recently launched a new blog, slowreading.net, where I intend to focus more on reading research and practices in libraries and in culture. But I have a number of thoughts on information technology that I have not unpacked. I wanted to do small justice to them by summing them up in a single post. I hope they are useful to somebody in the library field. [The 8 Laws of Library Technology are]:

1. It all comes down to data and rules... 2. Organized information is handier than disorganized information... 3. The rate at which data is being recorded is accelerating faster than our ability to manage it... 4. Librarians should not build their own software systems... 5. These days there is only one way to acquire a system: buy a package, and two, custom build it... 6. RSS and XML are cooler than you think... 7. Print is the next evolution in information technology... 8. Library technology is less interesting than librarianship... Continue reading

Filed under: librarianship, libraries, library2.0, print, software, technology

[NB. info courtesy: Sukhdev's World: Library Technology ]

See also:

Librarians and Techies – A NEXUS

Mining The Library Catalog: Emerging Trends, A Literature Survey

Alternative Cataloging / Information Visualization