It just occurs to me that it could be really fun to work as a technologist for a library. In the light of this article, it sounds like there's room to automate and enhance some stuff: scrape literary review websites for up and coming authors, apply machine learning to the library's records to find out if there are underlying trends in borrowing that can inform acquisitions, events, etc. And of course you could write cool visualizations to highlight the different metrics.
As a kid, the library was my second home - I'd go there after school almost everyday, and Saturdays from opening to closing. The library was a short 5 minute walk from my parents' house, which in retrospect is probably the thing that influenced my intellectual upbringing the most. (programming came right after, in my early teenage years) It remains with me to this day: I have a deep love for books, and dream of the day when I can accommodate a basement with rows and rows of bookshelves.
It would be fun, but on the other hand, to my understanding a library employee's idea of "good money" looks an awful lot like a technologist's idea of "OMG I am going to lose my house."
If you're interested in how libraries are using technology, check out code4lib[0], a community of technologists who work in libraries. Hang out with us on IRC, subscribe to our mailing list (which includes numerous job postings, many of which pay reasonably well[1]), read our peer-reviewed journal, and consider attending our conference. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
I also recommend checking out LibTechWomen[2] and Information Technology and Libraries[3].
It actually can pay pretty well. It's not Silicon Valley money, but it's around Milwaukee bigco CRUD code monkey money. I know a few liberal arts graduates that were working dead-end jobs who went back for the MLIS mainly for the money.
Being a technologist for libraries sounds awful, though. They deal all day w/locked-down journals, proprietary databases, the MARC formats, and various systems from the 60s - and I'd need more than I make now to work with that crap.
Do not confuse nostalgia for reveration. The old programming systems are indeed quaint, and should be preserved, but not used. There's a reason we've moved on.
I also find the algorithm they're using very interesting, as we have a lot to learn from the systems people have built (systems of any kind).
But making libraries better is not exactly an unsolved problem, the only problem is the solution made libraries themselves mostly obsolete. E-book stores and online publications make libraries "S" - Superseded, and library books "E" - Elsewhere.
Meh, I knew library technologists. None of them had any marketable skills for automation. It was a med library, so they knew the intersection of library sciences and a lot about medicine, but few of them could even conceive of editing their own HTML.
I have never understood the technologist position in place. In this particular library, I could really impress them with automation ideas I had, but they just wanted cloud services to do stupid garbage for them instead of learning.
I guess they were more of power-cloudists, not technologists.
It just occurs to me that it could be really fun to work as a technologist for a library. In the light of this article, it sounds like there's room to automate and enhance some stuff: scrape literary review websites for up and coming authors, apply machine learning to the library's records to find out if there are underlying trends in borrowing that can inform acquisitions, events, etc. And of course you could write cool visualizations to highlight the different metrics.
As a kid, the library was my second home - I'd go there after school almost everyday, and Saturdays from opening to closing. The library was a short 5 minute walk from my parents' house, which in retrospect is probably the thing that influenced my intellectual upbringing the most. (programming came right after, in my early teenage years) It remains with me to this day: I have a deep love for books, and dream of the day when I can accommodate a basement with rows and rows of bookshelves.
I kind of want to work for a library now!