[Web4lib] Skillset for new librarians

[Mutch, Andrew]

"As a recent (May '10) MLIS grad, my school (Wayne State) decreed,
starting with my incoming class, we're to take a "intro to technology"
class, if you will, that is to cover a lot of the basic groundwork on MS
Office/OpenOffice, HTML/CSS, lan/wan and hardware/software. Kind of a
plethora of a lot of things into a single class designed to give
introduction to things many of these students have not seen or heard of
before but will need to know as they go deep into librarination. The
idea is great in theory, but in practice it was an utter nightmare."

This was a great class for me - not as a student but as one of the
sources for students working on their assignment related to real-world
examples of computer networks in libraries. Every few months, one or two
students taking the class would contact the library looking to talk to
the tech person about "network topology" and "processor speeds". After
getting this request a couple of times, I created a Technology
Assessment for our library that listed all of our network
infrastructure, PC specs, application usage, etc. in a single document
that I shared with the student. It was a nice to have that push to put
together a lot of information that I had in various documents and
spreadsheets and to keep it updated regularly. I'm not sure how much the
students got out of the document but it's been handy for reports, grant
applications, etc. where I need to be able to quickly reference the
current state of my computer network. 

I did make the students come in and talk to me about the document and
gave them a tour of the library and specifically the server room so that
they could see in person what the document described. Like Lisa, I had
the impression that a lot of the students had a very cursory
understanding of the concepts they were asking questions about and I
wondered how much they were getting out of a course that seemed to cover
so much ground. I think it was good exposure for the students to
understand the complexity of the networks that exist in our libraries
and how much goes into supporting that. But I can see them being washed
over by the detail of covering that range of technology topics in a
single course. 

Andrew Mutch
Waterford Township Public Library
Waterford, MI