Lettertray

A contributor on Code4Lib recently posted a request for folks to fill out his survey about the future of libraries.  Without directly addressing the question about how libraries approach technologies going forward, Code4Lib-ers started an interesting,  somewhat barbed discussion about MLS/MLIS degrees being required for library technologist positions.  I realized after hitting the send button that my comments sounded a little like a dig at librarians.  I didn’t intend it that way.  I think that librarians have tough jobs and a lot of competeing demands, and the generally poor quality of many MLS programs don’t prepare students for the issues that they can and should be tackling in their libraries.

My initial email:

The discussion of the value MLIS/MLS is interesting, and familiar. It is a discussion that always seems to go in one direction: namely, why do library technologists need MLS degrees? There are some pretty compelling arguments that they don’t, but I’m curious what that means for librarians going forward.

I went to library school during what I consider to be the Great Delusion of the Late Nineties. There was a palpable sense among MLS students and librarians that we were about to find our groove in the proto-Google web world. My intro MLS courses were chock full of readings about librarians being hired away by Fortune 500 companies to help them make sense of Information, and about these mystical skills that librarians possessed that allowed us some insight into Information that others could not possess without an MLS.

What happened, of course, was that things changed quicker than MLS programs could adapt, and whether we liked it or not, our culture had moved beyond the need for librarians as gatekeepers. In the meantime, these amazing things are happening with open repositories, web services, and resource-oriented systems - things that should be front-and-center for emerging librarians, but often are skimmed because of the technical knowledge required. The result is that a lot of smaller academic libraries need to choose between enacting a really ambitious and forward-looking technology strategy, and protecting their MLS faculty lines. It seems like a doomed strategy in the long-run, but for a library director, I don’t think there is an easy answer. So a lot of places try to have it both ways and fish for skilled technologists with MLS degrees.

In my case, I went the other direction, currently working in a non-Library (but closely affiliated) technology group that is under the IT umbrella, despite having an MLS. So go figure…

I’m finally getting a chance to comment on last week’s DLF Fall Forum.  Since I’m not technically a librarian any more, I probably wouldn’t have gone.  But seeing as it was in Providence, it was a great excuse.

The most compelling new thing that I saw there was the Djatoka (not Djakota, as Birkin Diana pointed out) JPEG 2000 Image server.  Since I’m not really an image person, my simplistic impression of JPEG 2000 is that it is full of potential as a high-quality and scalable image format, but that it has lacked accessible and affordable software support.  The folks at Los Alamos have now released Djatoka, which seems to be … pardon me here … a game changer.

In practice, Djatoka shares some features with Google Maps - images can be delivered as AJAXy tilesets, which can be dynamically loaded in the browser as requested by the user.  But the really cool feature is URI addressibility of any region of an image.  So, you want to study Mona Lisa’s nosehairs? Here is a URL.  Not only that, but the API lets you pass a URI for any image, which the Djatoka server compresses on-the-fly, and then delivers in JPEG2000 format.

One of the controversial (in a nerdy way) features of Djatoka is its heavy use of OpenURL to reference & deliver parts of the image.  There has been some discussion on Code4Lib about whether there is a better way to do it.  I’d say there probably are better ways, but OpenURL is a way to get the server out there quickly and get people using it quickly.  Pretty much any transfer format would get somebody’s hackles up, so you might as well build some momentum early by using a nearly-universal format (nearly universal for academic institutions that is, the rest of you are on your own).  And hey, it is open source, so if you don’t like OpenURL, hack away.