Geek Grrls, Balance, and More
If I were a little more visually clever I’d enter this geek grrl photo contest. I think, though, that we need some librarian representation… if you enter, share here.
Picking up on previous discussions, I ran across “Why Are Women Exiting IT?” in InfoWorld recently, with more discussion and resources online. Apparently, not only are women still underrepresented in IT, but the numbers are actually declining — “For example, women accounted for 16.6 percent of all network and computer systems administrator positions in 2006, down from 23.4 percent in 2000.”
Beyond all the many, many other ways that we “lose our techie librarians,” I think one way to lose people is to pay insufficient attention to the issue of work/life balance. IT work, whether in- or outside of librarianship, can easily chip away at that whole balance thing, especially when we don’t fund it sufficiently and/or ask people to take on these responsibilities in addition to all their other librarian-ish duties.
On this note, it’s interesting to look at the Engendering Balance section of the InfoWorld report. Of course, this is nothing that hasn’t been said before, but is something that we should perhaps pay more attention to — both as a female-dominated profession and as one that’s so intimately intertwined with technology.
(edited a couple hours later to add… I forgot to link to this post about “all women’s day” — a call for postings by women on Web/Library 2.0 issues on March 8, which I meant to include here.)
Anonymous:
Rachel – I’m waiting for your book The Accidental Systems Librarian to arrive via ILL and I’m sure I’ll find some great information in there (and may should have waited to see it before I asked this) but do you have any other suggestions for people who seem to be progressing towards being techies, whom don’t actually have a need for specific information now (our campus IT covers all our library technology and thats not likely to change – especially since we’re not automated yet, so computers for staff and student use are the only technology we’ve got) but I’d like to know of some good books to read to increase my techie-ness in the meantime anyway… (I’m already the family go-to person for basic opensource and free software – I just got my father hooked on OpenOffice the other day)… Any suggestions? I’d take a class, but everything is either too basic (how to use this software…thank you but I can figure out most of that on my own thank you) or too specific (networking using a specific program or something – not useful when you’re not actually using that)
- a wanna be girl techie =)
22 February 2007, 8:06 pmRachel:
Hi – Hope that you find the book useful! As you’ve found, it really depends what kind of techie you wannabe — if your heart already lies in open source, then maybe set up and start playing with your own linux box and look for library-related apps to try out. Subscribe to some big overview techie blogs, like the LITA blog and ALA TechSource and blyberg.net, and when they mention interesting tools/topics, go and check them out. Think about how student and staff use of your current computers could be optimized, and make thoughtful suggestions to campus IT. Think about where you want to be in a few years and what types of technologies might be in use in the type of institution you want to work at, and direct your interests that way. That’s all you can really do!
4 March 2007, 7:47 pm