The academic library is a weird environment to be a programmer in. Tenured/tenured tracked (or quasi-academic, as the case may be) librarians think of you as a

The academic library is a weird environment to be a programmer in. Tenured/tenured tracked (or quasi-academic, as the case may be) librarians think of you as a para-professional librarian rather than a professional in your own right (and call you "techie"). On the one hand you have MARC21 (originally designed for printing catalog cards), and on the other hand MARC is supposedly being phased in favor of many competing flavors of RDF. The academic library fetishizes standards built on esoteric technology. There are a lot of fun projects though, and as a programmer I get the feeling that I'm really making an impact. (I'm not on a campus any more, more of an academic library consortium). I do think (hope) that Open Access initiatives will eventually disrupt the high costs of licensing academic publishing (the academy pays for the research in the first place, and then pays a second time to get access to it again). If research products were open, then there would not be a demand for something like Sci-Hub. Even when you consider ILS and OPAC migration projects, the on-line collections budget dwarfs the technology budget in libraries.