Ed Summers schrieb:

> The first step is admitting that you are unable to understand *all*
> the crazy library technology lingo, and that library-technology
> environment as a whole has become unmanageable. :-)

[evil grin]

> 2. Don't forget to look at trends outside of "Libraryland". 

I think that's really an important point. But I think you won't reach 
that point until you have gone through all this library technology 
madness (I think a lot here have, haven't you?).
It's not only the "big trends" that libraries tend to interpret their 
own way: I spent a lot of effort in learning a crude "kind of 
programming language" used in a library metasearch engine (maybe 20 
poeple in the world have some grasp of that "broker programming 
language" or "Robol" or whatever it is called, it even doesn't have a 
real name!). Totally worthless knowledge... The same could have been 
done with some lines of PHP, Java or whatever, but of course, libraries 
are special and need special solutions :-). Same with data conversion: 
For things that could be easily done using some regular expressions, 
Perl, XSLT, even sed or whatever usual text processing tool you like, we 
use a product specific (again crude) "kind of programming language" 
(nowhere clearly defined or documented, of course). Our whole business 
depends on putting lots of effort into pretty worthless technology 
knowledge...
And there are still people in the library scene, that dogmatically tell 
you reasons why you can't handle holy bibliographic library records in 
"vulgar full text search engines" like Solr... So the question is: Who 
has to learn?

Till