Random thought.
If public libraries didn't already exist, capitalism wouldn't let you invent it. Can you imagine how many billions Jeff Bezos would plough into fighting the idea, destroying any politician who dared to back it?
Support your local library.
As a minor tangent, can you imagine what the internet would look like today if it had been designed by librarians wanting universal access to information rather than billionaires wanting to lock information behind a paywall?
@ReggieHere it was designed that way wasn’t it? And then we poured the money on top. And starting in 1997 I became part of the problem
Yes, so many of us were dragged into the IT industry at that time, regardless of what we may have previously studied or trained to do.
In the 1990s I remember reading an article, not dissimilar to the 'Will AI replace my job?' articles we have today, and 'Librarian' topped a list of professions that would no longer exist in the newly-computerised world.
@ReggieHere I was lured in by reading Wired articles even though I sensed back then that much of it was full of shit.
I think most of us have a similar story of that time, and the bizarre part was that the same industry essentially recreated librarians in the 2000s to deal with the data silos that had been created in the 80s and 90s thanks to a lack of standards that would have otherwise been created by librarians.
Most of the IT roles starting with 'data' (data scientist, data wrangler, data manager, ...) have a physical analogue that pre-dates the IT industry by centuries.
David Njoku
Reg
Jonathan Schofield