[Web4lib] Skillset for new librarians

[Eric Lease Morgan]

Elizabeth Beers <brixton at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm preparing to teach a course entitled Introduction to Technology in LIS,
> and I'm looking for some input on what you consider critical tech skills for
> new librarians....


In a slightly dated LITA-hosted blog posting [1] I addressed this question, and below are snippets from my reply:

    1) XML – XML is a sort of modern-day alchemy.
    
    2) Relational databases – Libraries love lists.
    
    3) Indexing – Believe it or not, databases suck as facilitating
    search, especially considering today's user expectations
    regarding relevance ranking.
    
    4) Web serving – Increasingly people expect to acquire the
    information the require for learning, teaching, and research
    through a Web browser.
    
    5) Programming/scripting – Finally, you will want to "glue" all
    of the above technologies together into a coherent whole.
    
  Please do not be overwhelmed. All of these things can be learned
  and practiced on your desktop or home computer. They lend
  themselves better to server-class operating systems such a
  Unix/Linux, but learning about these operating systems is
  challenging in itself and not readily applicable to
  librarianship. All you need is the ability to read books, the
  desire to learn, and the time to do it.

[1] blog posting - http://bit.ly/hGqNm1

-- 
Eric Lease Morgan
University of Notre Dame

Great Books Survey -- http://bit.ly/auPD9Q