Family Man Librarian

I saw a link to an interview with Tim Spalding, creator of LibraryThing, via Library Stuff. The interview itself is available at Emily Chang’s eHub. LibraryThing continues to be one of my all time favorite sites, even though I haven’t had time lately to devote to it. Upon first look, I quickly bought a lifetime membership because I liked what I saw and wanted to support and use it regularly.

In the interview, Tim mentions that his hardcore support comes from book lovers, academics, librarians — those sorts of people. That means I’m in good company as a librarian and technogeek

One of the things that most stood out to me in the interview was the fact that although Tim is obviously very tech savvy and works with computers for a living, he does not have an academic background in computer science. Instead, he apparently studied Classics. I find this very interesting. My observation over the years is that there a lot of people in the computer world who have gone through computer science curricula or who have extensive, formal training in computer stuff. Then there is a huge group of others who tend to have a humanities background that does not include much, if any, formal computer science education. This latter group has largely learned the techie stuff on its own. Some of the brightest and best people I’ve known in terms of their computer knowledge have no formal compute education. I happen to fall into this category, too (not of the best and brightest, just the fact that I have no educational background in computer science, yet I work with designing software for libraries). My background is in history and German, with a graduate degree in library and information science. The latter degree had certain technological requirements and I had one programming class as part of completing the degree, however, the emphasis back when I was in library school was most certainly on libraries, still, not so much on the information science aspect like it is today. And frankly that was the way I wanted it (and still do).

So…if you’re interested in working with computers, should you pursue the formal computer science type of education, or should you just learn it on your own or by experience? I don’t know which is better; I just find it interesting (and beneficial) that there is a diversity of backgrounds in the techie world.