Joho the Blog
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November 03, 2006
After my talk at KMWorld + Taxonomy BootCamp yesterday, a young man asked me for career advice. Jeez, you ever want to feel your age, have that happen to you! Anyway, he's thinking of going to grad school in library science and wanted to know what I thought of that as a career move. After taking the opportunity to pass along several nuggest of wisdom — You never understand a man until you've danced backwards in his high heels, 95% of life is showing up in your pajamas, etc. — I noted that I'm not up on what the library sci grad schools are teaching, but that there will be a big demand for people who can help us find, understand and reuse information (or, as I like to think of it, create an infrastructure of meaning). We're going to need lots of help thinking through systems that will enable multiple orders to emerge from the behaviors of distributed groups. Something like that. As soon as I left, I D'oh'ed myself for not pointing him to library bloggers like Karen Schneider, Jessamyn West, the Shifted Librarian, LibrarianInBlack, Liz Lawley, plus everyone I'm forgetting because I freeze when making lists. [Tags: libraries everything_is_miscellaneous information_architecture erkman] Posted
by D. Weinberger at November 3, 2006 04:37 PM
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Comments
Sounds like good advice to me. I'm just glad we have the Dave Weinbergers' of the world that can explain Librarianship, even when floundering for words. :-)
Steve
Posted by: Steve Matthews | November 3, 2006 06:25 PM
And Liz Lawley, remember.
Posted by: AKMA | November 3, 2006 06:43 PM
D'oh! Of the bloggers I listed, Liz is by far the one I know best! That's why I stay away from doing lists like this. (I've snuck her into the post itself, ex post Akma.)
Posted by: David Weinberger | November 3, 2006 06:57 PM
And how! Librarians with tech knowledge and systems-oriented thinking are going to have a lot of fun work to do in the upcoming years if not the upcoming decades.
Posted by: jessamyn | November 4, 2006 02:10 AM
And please include Christine Madsen .. the librarian who co-created (with Thom Michalak - former head of the Baker Library, Harvard Business School) and manages the Open Collections Programme at Harvard University, and who frequents Berkman Center luncheons. This is her specific area of speciality.
OCP is here: http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu
Christine is here: christine [dot] madsen [at] harvard [dot] edu
Posted by: Matthew Steven Carlos | November 6, 2006 05:07 PM
And, don't forget that 40% of information architects have a library science degree :-)
http://iainstitute.org/documents/research/results/polar_bear_survey_5.html
Posted by: Peter Morville | November 6, 2006 11:21 PM
In David's keynote, he talked about the next iteration of the web being about externalizing meaning, and constructing the infrastructure that supports this. What I really wanted to know in asking him for career advice was if libraries even had a place in this world view, or if they might simply become obsolete as new institutions replaced them. Would there even be jobs for Library grads like me in 2-3 years, or would new advances turn every internet user into a librarian? I've been asking a lot of people these questions, and have been encouraged by the answers. I appreciated David talking to me and following up in this blog post.
Posted by: Ben | November 9, 2006 05:28 PM