Whenever somebody asked me, what is my job - exactly? I used to be at a loss of words. I could not point to any existing common job description or well-known piece of work and say that's my job. How do I explain all the technical intricacies of our work? It's difficult to simplify.
Over time, I have come to say that if you consider a merger of interests between the fields of Computer Science and Library Science, that's where my job domain lies. That usually sets the tone for further elaborations.
Part of our work is about finding ways to make the library collections accessible online. The keywords here should probably be accessible & online. On the one hand it sounds like an easy job - just chuck everything on some server and link to all that from a web page, but on the other hand there's more - descriptions, metadata, searching, finding, browsing, displaying (including audio), collaborate, information architecture, design, technology and so on. When one gets into details of how to do all these effectively, there are book volumes worth of details.
Now, we are getting lots of new requirements from the latest trend - the social Web 2.0. We will get requests for tagging, user reviews, ratings and any other sort of user-contributed-content. For the majority of users, the web used to be about listening - now its about having a conversation.
It is a very demanding environment to work in, but also very exciting. As Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot would have it - "It is the brain, the little gray cells on which one must rely".
Aditya (Eddie) P. Anand is a Technical Analyst in the Innovation Centre
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