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November 22, 2004
Librarians as business travellers in the computer culture
My friend Colin is a programmer, and not only is he way smart, but terribly eloquent. Funny that, I'm sure you're thinking.
Anyway, he wrote this awesome post titled "The language of computers" on the nature of computers as a culture of it's own, and how different types of people fit into that culture, using tourists, business travellers, expats, and people who have gone native as the users within the culture:
When you study a foreign language, you learn more than just the language. Or the language is more than just grammar and vocabulary. It's culture. And maybe that's a better way of putting it. When you say you have to learn the language of computers, you really mean the culture of computers. Not so much the specific programming languages, but language in the broader sense of how to interact with computers.
I think this particular bit describes the ideal basic knowledge of a librarian:
Then there's the business traveller. Knows their way around, but only in the business districts. Has colleagues there. By analogy, has a set of applications they use for work. Maybe knows a bit about Word document formatting, making presentations. May be adept with spreadsheet software, creating formulas and macros.
The entire essay is a user-friendly peek inside the computer world, from the perspective of a programmer with non-programmers subconsciously in mind. He also mentions "In the Beginning was the Command Line" by Neal Stephenson (the download off the linked page yields a large .txt file for your free reading pleasure), which is described by the back cover text of my monograph copy as "a thoughtful, irreverent, hilarious treatise on the cyber-culture past and present". Read it, he makes tech into digestible English (and makes fun of HTML), uses code bits as examples that somehow make a bit of sense to the unindoctrinated, and it will make you laugh and the wobbly history of computers and the internet as we know them. Good stuff.
November 22, 2004 11:20 AM