There has been a lot of talk throughout the biblioblogosphere to the effect that more librarians need to be coders. As always, there’s some question of how much this meme has percolated through the wider community, so to summarize:

Most librarians don’t know much about programming, and this lack has contributed to an online user experience that is a lot less interactive and useful than it should be.

And I think in many ways this is right on target.

Of course, a lot of the blame rests on the systems that we have to work with. Most ILSs have no API at all, much less a good one. Some of the online resources we lease access to come with Z39.50/SRW/something else interfaces, but even professional metasearch developers are often forced to use screen-scraping to get what they need.

Many vendors mean well, and there is certainly a chance that given enough time (and enough market pressure from the people who sign the invoices), things will begin to change for the better.

In the meantime, we have to work with what we have right now. Opportunities exist to use the data that we do have access to, and a lot more could be done to leverage our existing investments in web technologies.

So what to do?

One solution would be for libraries to hire staff who already code. Really large libraries have often hired non-MLS IT support people to pull the ethernet cables and tend the servers, and they often have room for programmer/developers as well. There might be some opportunity to go after the women who are being driven out of comp sci departments. And certainly there’s anecdotal evidence of IT folks who tire of patching broken code or reinstalling printer drivers and seek a second career in librarianship. But I don’t think that this adds up to enough people. Given the realities of the market (librarian salaries aren’t the same as programmer salaries), I don’t think it ever will.

So we have to grow our own.

“But I’m not a programmer!” So? I’m not saying that we all need to start writing Linux device drivers from scratch. You don’t even have to call it programming. That’s just a word that scares people, especially the sort of humanities-oriented, mildly math-phobic people (like me) who end up going to library school.

A lot of the work that needs to be done is really less about hard core programming than it is tweaking, modifying and generally (to use Dorothea Salo’s great phrase) “beating on things with rocks until they work”. Again, there’s a lot we can do with relatively little effort, but we have to start doing it. All those shiny new Library 2.0 tools aren’t going to build themselves.

Trying to take the time to really learn a programming language would be fantastic. But there’s also a lot to be said for installing Perl or PHP on an extra machine, firing up a text editor, and seeing if you can get the little bugger to say “Hello World!”

<plug>
If you’re in the New England neighborhood, you might think about taking a NELINET class or two to jump-start the process. I’m teaching one called “Exploding Your OPAC” that deals with a lot of these issues.
</plug>