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I could give you tons of advice, most of it specific to some technological domain or another, but over the years I've more or less settled on one thing that beat out all the other ; Data models. Once you grok data models, what they are, how they work, and all the extended family (schemas, ontologies, persistent identification, querying, de-duplication, layered models, LUT/transcripts, stored procedures [and why they are evil], RDBMS vs. NoSQL vs. whatever, and so on), everything else is miscellaneous. The way we humans use computers as tools are all rooted in a data model at the bottom of some program or database, and the rest of the time is spent interacting with the data model, trying to make it do the things we need it to do, and so on. Everything is about and around that data model, so getting it right is a lot more important than any amount of beautiful coding against it. So, that's my big tip; all that technology we much about with is really trying to work well with a data model. Your task should rather be to understand the why, who, how, when and the thenceforth of data models, and everything else will follow. Now, this tip could under normal circumstances be applied to any part of the IT industry, but it makes especially sense in the library world. Most of the time is spent converting data between data models (whatever > MARC > whatever), or making sense of the one (MARC21/FRBR) or other (AACR2/RDA and that third one I can never remember the name of, that extension rules to AACR2?) or three (LCSH/DDC). We're all battling against the original thought and implementation of data models, and very often you'll find better technological solutions when you understand the underlying human efforts of ... data modeling (and by extension, you might discover my pet peeve, how all bad software and systems in the world comes from bad data modeling, and *not* from bad programming [even if there's plenty of that, too]) Regards, Alex -- Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps --- http://shelter.nu/blog/ ---------------------------------------------- ------------------ http://www.google.com/profiles/alexander.johannesen ---