Many highly capable librarians that I know are constantly self-deprecating about their technical skills. And I think this comes from years of IT departments ignoring or belittling the skills they have (from my experience anyway!)

I remember when I started my Masters, like all the others, I only knew of Academic and Public/State libraries and no idea that there were so many other options available for someone with info management skills. And it’s frustrating to think about now, as I would have done my degree very differently, paid attention to different aspects etc.

I’m actually both a trained librarian, and a trained web designer. So I’m trying to mesh both my skills together at the moment!

I have a library degree and briefly worked in a formal library before shifting to IA. As a manager of a large IA team I always wanted to hire more people with a library background but we didn’t get many applications, and when we did we often found the applicants lacked confidence. In seven years we managed to poach one librarian from our own (huge) library staff.

One of my team went to speak to new library graduates and was disappointed that their ambitions were to get the best library job (for the Guardian, it seemed at the time) and didn’t seem interested in taking their skills outside the library. She was baffled as she felt she was telling them about a role that was accorded more respect by organisations and certainly pays a whole lot more.

And Rosenfeld and Morville who wrote the O’Reilly IA book were librarians first, of course.