Carleton College Library

Recently I was speaking to a colleague at another institution about some tension that existed between the library and the information technology department. My colleague was frustrated about some information that she had been asked to provide. “They wanted to know some more details about who OCLC was before they opened up ports in the firewall. They’d never even heard of OCLC. Can you believe that?”

Well…yes. While OCLC is a vital player in the library world, they are aren’t a name our IT colleagues have necessarily needed to know. Especially if an institution doesn’t have a history of library/IT collaboration, it’s not surprising at all that someone whose job is network security would ask questions about opening up firewall ports for OCLC. To that person it’s just a request from an unknown external vendor.

Those of us in the library world need to understand that we have a lot of knowledge that might not be shared by others outside the profession. We also need to remember that people who ask questions aren’t trying to make things difficult, they are just doing their jobs. We each have unique areas of expertise, we use our own jargon, we come with certain professional assumptions. Let’s try to see each other’s points of view.

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This post was written by Eric Hinsdale