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It's interesting that computer literacy in general used to mean programming and today means word processing and spreadsheets. When I was in high school in the lovely years of Reaganomics and fear of nuclear war, my Intro to Data Processing class was all about learning to program BASIC on good ol' TRS-80s. Today, the same class and same teacher are all about learning Microsoft Office and how to surf the web. In library school, I took a class called "Advanced Automation" which was an introduction to programming simple (very simple) library applications using Turbo Pascal. It was a lot of fun, a bunch of graduate students with no prerequisite knowledge learning the very basics of programming in a very simple language. But what did I actually get out of the class? Am I developing major applications today using Turbo Pascal? Of course not! But like Carol Bean pointed out, even minimal exposure gives you experience with the culture and terminology. I tend to think that the same was true with my Data Processing class in the 80s: most of the students left that class and never wrote another program, but it (hopefully) influenced how they viewed the programs they ended up using. Most librarians I know are heavily dependent on computers for their daily job. Most have neither the time nor desire to become computer programmers. However, IMHO, most would make better decisions about technology (from purchases to troubleshooting their workstations) and be better able to communicate with IT departments and automation vendors if they had a little bit of that "computer programming as computer literacy" background. How important should programming be for a typical librarian's job (whatever that is!)? Probably important enough to understand the creation and functioning of the technological infrastructure that supports our traditional tasks. What I wonder is whether library schools should offer more courses that allow students to take some pretty hard programming electives (maybe "LIS590: Object Oriented Design for ILS Development")? If a person went to library school and took almost exclusively programming and technology courses (except for a required "Intro to Librarianship" survey course), in what sense would she or he be a librarian rather than a computer programmer who happened to get their degree from library school? Or, put another way, when I show the IT people here the curricula from library schools, they shake their head and say "that's MIS" or "aren't those CS courses?" How much of time in an LIS curriculum to train librarians can be spent on "IS" rather than "LS"? Mike Reid Assistant Librarian Lincoln Christian College and Seminary [log in to unmask]