Get with the programme info pros?
Jinfo Blog

10th February 2010

By Joanna Ptolomey

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I feel very optimistic about my profession. I enjoy working in this industry so much I wrote a book about managing your career as a library and info professional – it is the sheer variety of work and skills sets that can be utilised that astonishes me. Anne Jordan wrote recently (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27841) that although the job market for us professionals has been very up and down the last few years, it is quite a rosy future. In times of change there are only ever two things that we as professionals can do. Firstly, take fright, be nervous and keep your head down hoping no-one will notice you. Or secondly, see the changing market place, technologies and shifting of organisational structures as a chance to inject that extra ‘va va voom’ into your job or skills set. And as I am feeling rather optimistic today I will take option two. And I have just the ticket that could transform my role and skill set. Programming! Wait a minute I am not a programmer, don’t even want to be. I am interested in information, documents…..why do I need programming. My eyes were open recently by an article in Research Information (http://digbig.com/5bbbpr ), programming skills could transform librarians’ roles. We know that the traditional role of the library is gone. However, are we still thinking about being the provider of a document? Should we be moving beyond the concept of the document to facilitate the access of the large amounts of data available on the web? We are in competition with our users. They are no longer impressed by the ability to find and download a document, and why would they be? But if we could combine data in new formats and enable access to where people need it most then we could be on to a winner – professionally and as an industry that it real value. But we need programming skills to do this, but do we need to train as professional programmers? Probably not. But we are already starting to see the buds of these skills coming through in the profession via mashup tools and editors. In recent FUMSI contributions we have seen examples by Nicole Engard (http://web.fumsi.com/go/article/use/4341) and Scott Brown (http://web.fumsi.com/go/article/find/4342) on using Yahoo! Pipes and other editors. Ready to step up a gear with your service? Let us look at the evidence – we have access to internal and external information and we also have knowledge of our users needs. Could we therefore as a next stage offer up some data collection and manipulation as a valuable bolt-on? I think we are probably heading there anyway – if you are not better get with the programme!

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