Librarians and Programmers

Via Dave Winer kwam ik terecht bij een geweldige post op AnthoBLOGy over de lastige relatie tussen programmeurs en bibliothecarissen. Nu ben ik een beetje van beide, misschien dat het juist daarom allemaal o zo herkenbaar is: 

I work a lot with librarians as well as geeks. Someone (probably a librarian) somewhere thought, since both librarians and programmers work with information, they must be related, and must work together. But as my notes based on working with either, tell you, they are quite different groups that quite don’t get along.

What the humans call a book, the librarians call a monograph. What we call a periodical, they call a serial or a title. A database system for a geek means a relational database management system, for a librarian it means a collection of citations.

Librarians are nit-pickers. They get very frustrated (who doesn’t?) because the programmers won’t listen to them. Unfortunately what librarians don’t get is that some of the programmers have sound mathematical foundations in their brain, and can organize the information much better for easy retrieval, than the librarians can. The librarians refuse to accept that programmers get organization of information.

Natuurlijk is het ietwat zwaar aangezet, maar zowel bibliothecaris als programmeur zal zeker toch wel iets van deze onderlinge wrijving herkennen.

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