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    Code4Lib BC, and the End of the Systems Librarian?
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I've been mostly out of the library tech conference loop
since, oh, around late 2019 or so. In fact, I didn't leave
the Island for 4 years, only breaking my travel moratorium
last summer to attend the retirement celebrations of my
friend and once-upon-a-time colleague and later boss, AC.
But there were times during the depths of the pandemic when
I would dream I was attending a far away conference,
wandering around beige hotel corridors looking for some
random panel discussion on the latest tech trends in
libraries, drinking bad coffee and eating generic wraps and
stale pastries.  I'd been feeling slightly jaded about
conference travel before the pandemic, but it turned out to
be one of the things I missed.

So when I had the opportunity to join the planning committee
for the newly-revived annual Code4Lib BC unconference, I
didn't have to think too hard before saying "yes". The
unconferences are a great, low-barrier opportunity for folks
interested in library technologies to get together and talk
shop, including the non-librarians who often don't get much
in the way of pro-D funding, as attendance fees have stayed
at $10 since we organized the first one back in 2013.  And
Code4Lib unconferences are not too hard to organize, at
least compared to a 'real' conference.  Rent a mid-size
meeting room at a local college or university, order a
couple of rounds of coffee and pastries, drum up some
volunteer programming and a social event or two, set up
registration on EventBrite, and you're basically done.

Attendance at these things has never been super-high,
despite the low fee. We had 80 attendees at the first one,
and numbers dropped to around 50-60 after that. But the
registrations trickled in very slowly this time around. A
week beforehand we were only up to 35 or so, and I was
beginning to wonder if the whole "unconference" thing was an
idea whose time had come and gone.  But we had a flurry of
sign-ups right before the event, bringing the numbers up to
a more respectable 48.

The talks were highly enjoyable and informative, as were the
breakout sessions in the afternoons, and it was a privilege
and a pleasure to reconnect with longtime colleagues who I'd
only seen, if at all in the past few years, on Zoom or
Teams.

But as the unconference went on, I began to notice a theme
emerging, somewhat markedly different from the more
optimistic/empowering takes on technology characteristic of
unconferences in years past.  A theme which I'd describe as
"libraries losing control of technology" in various
different ways:

* Shifting formerly in-house applications and infrastructure
  to the cloud

* Academic libraries losing in-house IT staff to University
  IT

* Outsourcing formerly human-dependent work like metadata
  production to AI

* Increasing reliance on vendor tech support to solve
  problems, as we no longer have the systems access we'd
  need to do it ourselves

* Increasing complexity of systems, making DIY support and
  development increasingly difficult

All of the above played right into my lately-growing
conviction that my curious little professional
specialization, that of "Systems Librarian", may well be on
the road to the cyber scrapheap.  What need to cultivate
librarians with systems know-how, when the library's
engagement with IT is increasingly superficial? One day,
perhaps, the "Library Systems Team" will consist of little
more than some anonymous lackey in a back room writing
cheques to information vendors.  Should that dismal vision
come to pass it would represent a profoundly disappointing
shuttering of the vistas of possibility that seemed to be
opening up back at the start of my career, when open source
and the Creative Commons made it plausible that libraries
would soon take ownership of our newly digital collections
in ways undreamed-of in the analogue, pre-web era. "Orphans
of Netscape, Library Edition" is a phlog post I may well write
some day.

But it wasn't all doom and gloom, of course. Some of the
presentations (including mine!) still hewed to the
time-honoured "look at the cool stuff we did with tech"
genre; the social event at Internet Archive Canada (aka The
Permanent) was a real highlight, with some very welcome
gate-crashers who didn't make the main event; and the
pastries - having been baked fresh by Vancouver Community
College students that very morning - were anything but
stale.

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References:

Code4Lib BC
https://wiki.code4lib.org/BC

Orphans of Netscape:
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/orphans-of-netscape.txt