j's scratchpad

I sat at the right end of the table at dinner the other night. The three guys across from me are all programmers. They all volunteered very nice thoughts about librarians and talked about how librarians could help them with their work. One guy recognized that librarians could help a lot with project documentation and wants a software librarian. Another admitted concerns that a degreed-librarian may not be what he wants because s/he might not know enough about programming. (Maybe I can convince him otherwise–there are some librarians who definitely know about programming.) The third guy said something really brilliant that I was going to blog, but have since forgotten (of course).
The fourth guy wished me a Happy Year of the Monkey. One of them lamented not having his own personal librarian. The thoughts were all much broader than the “I find librarians sexy” kind of praise.

I also broached the idea that librarians could help them with usability and accessibility testing, information architecture, project development, client relations, interface design, and several other aspects of their projects, too. Some of us do much more than just books and organizational schemes.

I’m so used to people who walk away from me when they learn I’m a librarian that I still am amazed that so many people I meet, especially people working in the computer industry, really appreciate librarians and our set of skills.

One of my girlfriends would tell me that these guys were all trying to pick me up, but I give them more credit than that. I sincerely believe, gullible fool that I am, that they really do like librarians and see us as valuable people who can contribute to their work.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 31st, 2004 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Librarianship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.