Caveat Lector

I live in the middle ground of technology savvy in libraries. At the upper end of that middle ground, I daresay, but nonetheless.

I’m so over Computers in Libraries. For some people, it’s great. It teaches me nothing… and it is the state of the tech-education art as mass library conferences go, I’m afraid. That’s not a slur on those conferences, just a recognition that I’m well beyond the audience they’re aiming at.

I’m not limited to consumer-level tech, on or off the Web. I can install and configure software. I can even (occasionally) do so from the command line, though I need a recipe for that, and if it fails, I have to have recourse to Google, because ant and maven and make are blackholes to me. I’ve been a cargo-cult sysadmin. I’m a tolerable jackleg webmonkey, though don’t ask me to do complicated CSS grid layouts. I can edit Other People’s Code. Sometimes. If it makes sense to me. Java, with its highly abstract programming patterns, fails to make sense to me as often as not; I’ve hit a lot of brick walls looking at DSpace and Manakin code. I can write big ugly inefficient SQL queries; I know nothing of query optimization. I can write text-munging code in Python, pretty badly because parsers and lexers are foreign except as terms. I grok more markup than most, though even I get lost in the jungle of specs around XML.

That’s it, really. That’s what I can do. Techier than your average bear, but not a true techie… and the mark of the true techie is being able to move on, self-propelled. I’m not good at that. All these years, and I still can’t write a simple webapp. What is up with that?

The middle ground I’m in is large. It contains multitudes. It is not well-served by the current state of professional education in librarianship. People like me can take programming classes that aren’t oriented to libraries, and I’ve done that, and it’s been valuable—but it hasn’t gotten me over the real humps holding me back. Context matters.

Turning us loose in the wilds of IRC isn’t going to do the trick either. Middle-grounders tend to be exactly the kind of n00b that your average IRCer will have a grand old time kicking the crap out of. There are also matters of culture to consider; a lot of middle-grounders have enough geek-culture cred to get by (I’ve never had any difficulty in that regard), but not all of them by any means, and it’s hard to integrate into a typical IRC community without that.

Besides, a lot of us middle-grounders are women. ’Nuff said, for now.

So it seems to me that the problem, and therefore the solution to it, is tripartite: contextualized training in tools and programming techniques that work for typical library problems, conferences and other professional-ed opportunities aimed at middle-grounders, and a loose network of colleagues to ask questions of when the inevitable brick walls loom.

I like the BarCamp model of advance organization for the first and second problems, quite a lot. Let folks decide what problems they have and want to solve; someone will turn up who can do the training. Or a trainer will throw out some ideas, and what sticks, sticks. BarCamps are also cheap (to run and to attend) by design, which is important, because your average middle-grounder needs a lot of different kinds of help. My own laundry-list is grotesquely long.

Conferences are a harder nut to crack for middle-grounders. You can’t propose a BarCamp-style “whatever people want” pre- or post-conference session to a conference, because the conference just won’t bite. If you suggest something specific, you’re gambling that sufficient librarians needing that specific thing will actually attend the conference; if a pre- or post-conference doesn’t generate enough attendance to cover its costs, all the conferences I’ve taught at cancel it ruthlessly. (Which isn’t a practice I argue with. Conferences aren’t charities.) We’ll probably have to do our own events, which is a pity, but the world is what it is.

The network is probably the hardest thing of all to arrange, because middle-grounders have such holes in their knowledge. There’s more than a small chance that one person with a specific expertise will be swamped by everyone else’s need—and that’s if the network coalesces in the first place, by no means a given. I don’t have the magic pixie dust to make a middle-grounder community. I don’t know who does. I just know that they don’t seem to emerge the way that the code4lib community did, or the loose confederation of (mostly) public-services librarians I’m on the edges of in Twitter and FriendFeed.

I do have the beginning of a solution, or at least a suggestion, for the whole Woman Question. (Yes, I know. Me? Solutions instead of whinging? Miracles do happen.) I am a partisan of the Open Source Women Back Each Other Up Project & Gentlemen’s Auxiliary (see its genesis here), and I’d be happy to see something like it become common in areas where women can’t necessarily expect respectful treatment. I’ll bring (or mail) the buttons to a face-to-face event. I’ll wear a website badge. And I will pledge to overcome my personal cowardice and speak the hell up, online and in person alike. Enough to start with, perhaps?

I linked Steve’s post above, but I’ll link it again, because I’m interested in seeing his ideas realized, and if some critical mass can be achieved, I’d gladly pitch in.