
Library Science Helped Me Understand Databases - turingbook
https://www.stephaniemorillo.co/post/how-library-science-helped-me-understand-databases
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petepete
Oddly I can trace my interest in databases back to playing Championship
Manager in the early-mid nineties. For those not in the know, it's a football
management simulator that, apart from the actual game mechanics, is basically
a rdbms.

I made my own in FileMaker Pro for a school project. They were the days.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Championship_Manager](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Championship_Manager)

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InvisibleUp
From what I understand (I'm just starting to look into this myself as a
potential career option), database design and other technical skills like
scripting and web design are becoming an increasingly important part of
library science. There's a new-ish degree, "Masters in Library and Information
Science", that combines both library and information knowledge like this.

There's plenty of open source library management tools such as Evergreen[1] or
Invenio[2] for more standard data (like book metadata) but it's still helpful
regardless to understand how databases work, what fields might be useful, how
normalization works, etc. to better organize and understand the data in a
library.

[1][https://evergreen-ils.org/](https://evergreen-ils.org/)
[2][http://inveniosoftware.org/](http://inveniosoftware.org/)

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karaterobot
When I got my MLIS in 2007, it was not a very technically rigorous program,
and the technical classes were only meant to introduce non-technical people to
systems they might eventually have to talk about in a meeting, but not work
with directly.

The people I graduated with mostly went into libraries (naturally), or else
went into Product Management, UX, or Information Architecture. If you want to
have a contributing technical role in your future position, I urge you to ask
very specific questions about curriculum of the program you consider applying
to!

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InvisibleUp
That's good to know, thank you. Really this is more of a what-if thought
experiment than anything serious right now.

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withinboredom
I worked at a place that hired librarians to manage the data in the database
and keep it clean. It was pretty wild, and when I've suggested this at other
places I got blank stares.

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TomMarius
In my country we call it Information Science. I always thought it's the same
in English though.

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tokai
The two terms are not wholly synonyms, even though they are closely related.
The discipline is often called Library and Information Science or LIS for
short.

I personally call it Documentation because I like Otlet.

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jbverschoor
And please don't break space for scrolling...

