We Can Do IT: Women in Library Information Technology

摘要

1 Librarianship has been a profession dominated by women over the past several decades, whereas information technology (IT) jobs are primarily held by men. What happens when these worlds collide? Libraries are undergoing a rapid shift from print materials and physical services to digital collections and online services. The distinction between fields has begun to blur as libraries adapt to current technology trends, but societal and cultural expectations can be slow to catch up. We Can Do IT: Women in Library Information Technology is a collection of personal narratives from (mostly) women about tensions inherent in the field, where one's gender, background, and education create a unique set of professional challenges. The essays represent a variety of perspectives from academic, public, and corporate librarians. Contributors are managers, systems librarians, emerging technology librarians, web developers, administrators, programmers, catalogers, and consultants.2 Many have shared similar experiences and describe pervasive examples of sexism: women kept out of key conversations, assigned clerical tasks in addition to regular job responsibilities, actively discouraged from working on technical projects, seeing their contributions minimized or attributed to men. A number of writers came into library IT positions through nontraditional avenues. Several women describe how their lack of formal education in computer science, coupled with societal expectations and biases about gender roles in the workplace, made them afraid of being perceived as incompetent and caused them to question whether they belong in the field. Others came to libraries from technical backgrounds and found that in the world of IT their librarian titles are more disparaged than their gender. Christina Mune captured this set of challenges: "Whether a woman in library IT is traditionally trained in her technology role or inhabiting it from the pathway of digital librarianship, emerging technologies, or technical services she is likely struggling against not only gender equity issues as an IT person, but also against library and/or librarian stereotypes" (p.202).