Hi all,

I was talking this afternoon with a friend of mine about what makes a good
Director of Library IT. Does the job lie more within librarianship or IT?
(Depends on the library.) Is there a natural separation between the
"Library IT" of ILS/MARC/e-resource/circ. technology maintenance and the
"Traditional IT" of network management, staff and public workstation
provisioning, telecom, etc? (Also depends on the library.)

I know a lot gets said (here and elsewhere) about Technology for Librarians
- important skills and standards, what's
important/useful/trending/ignorable, and the like. But I'd love to start a
discussion (or join one, if it already exists elsewhere) about the other
side of things - the library-specific stuff that experienced IT folks might
need to learn or get used to to be successful in a library environment. Not
just technical stuff like MARC, but also ethical issues like fair use,
information privacy, freedom of access, and the like.

Of course there are plenty of snarky answers, and I welcome them all, but
some constructive input would be nice, too. :-) I hope to compile a "So
You're an Experienced IT Worker/Administrator Who Wants to Work in a
Library?" wiki page with pointers to resources.

So there's my vague intro. Have at it, code4lib.

Michael