Nicole C. Engard - The Accidental Systems Librarian

I was very excited to be asked to write the foreword for this book. As a systems librarian myself, I find that resources like this one can be very helpful. I found the book to be a useful, insightful, and well-written guide for people responsible for computer technology in library settings.

Are you an accidental systems librarian? Have you seen your career gravitate toward the management of computers in libraries? I certainly have, and if you have too, then you are a systems librarian. If you just seemed to fall into this position, then you may very well be an accidental systems librarian. Either way, congratulations! This book is for you because you have just become a member of a newer, up-and-coming specialty of the professiona speciality that is only going to increase in importance and not going to go away anytime soon. Welcome to the club!

In this book, Engard and Gordon describe the competencies of this subdiscipline as well as the various characteristics of a fully qualified systems librarian. This is very important because most of the skills they describe are not taught in the current library school curriculum. Everything you need to know is included: what software to master, techniques for learning new skills, how to network with colleagues, and of course, communication, communication, and more communication. Along the way are very useful and very insightful quotes from people in the field, short interviews, and pointers to websites all supporting and elaborating on the text.

After readingand understandingthis book, you too will discover that systems librarianship is less about computers and more about librarianship. The skills and competencies of systems librarians are very similar to the skills and competencies of librarians in general. I believe the use of the reference interview is an excellent case in point. The difference between systems librarians and other types of librarians is often more a matter of the intended audiences for services and those tools in which services become a reality.

That said, it is important to understand that systems librarianship is not limited to providing support to other people who work in libraries. No, I think its definitionas Engard and Gordon point outextends to local collection building and the provision of services to library readers (I no longer use the word users). For example, as a systems librarian, I have personally amassed a collection of more than 14,000 public domain full-text books in the areas of American and English literature as well as Western philosophy. I call this digital library the Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts. Not only does its index support full-text searching, but each and every item in the collection is associated with concordancing functions enabling people who use the catalogue to do distant reading against the content. The catalogue has been online since 1994 and receives thousands upon thousands of hits every day. In this way, I am providing real library services to a global audience, and it is all because of my systems librarianship skills.

Depending on how one counts, librarianship has existed for hundreds if not thousands of years. For much of that time, the principles and processes of librarianship have remained rather constant. I believe they include the collection, organization, preservation, dissemination, and sometimes evaluation of data, information, and knowledge. These processes are the whats of librarianship. They dont change very much. On the other hand, the hows of librarianship evolve as technology evolves. The evolution of the venerable library catalog is an excellent example. Think first about the knowledge of collections inside a librarians mind. Then think scrolls, books, card catalogs, online public access catalogs grounded in database applications, and current index-based discovery systemsall tools used to help the reader find and access materials in a library, and all examples of evolutions in technology.