>>the world needs more people doing the cataloging
I don't disagree. My point wasn't that non-experts shouldn't be enabled to do cataloguing, but that cataloguing is an art and that it takes practice to get good at it, whether you are a "trained" librarian or not.
Very few people get an MLIS to become "experts" - at cataloguing or anything else. (Most of my classmates in my cataloguing class hated doing the actual work of cataloguing, and I suspect it's always been that way.) Most get an MLIS because it's required to be considered for professional-level positions in libraries. That unfortunately makes it akin to a vocational degree, unless you strive to make it something more. The ALA has discussed standardizing MLIS curricula for ages, but that has yet to happen. Until the curriculum you get in an MLIS program is standardized, and those standards are adhered to for hiring and retention purposes (a la medical school followed by ongoing board certification), an MLIS will continue to be seen as a job ticket.
It's too bad that you took some outdated courses (they still exist, unfortunately, as anyone currently or just out of almost any MLIS program can tell you). But they definitely don't represent current thinking in information studies. All of the issues you bring up are being discussed in forward-thinking IS programs.
But I digress. My point is that cataloguing is complex - not because the AACR2 is full of arcane rules and strangely organized (although it is both), but because teasing out all the details can get very interesting. That's what makes cataloguing something more than "monotonous, tedious effort".
>>a folksonomy that could accommodate the hierarchy of each and every one of these ill conceived classifications
Why would you want to accomodate an "ill-conceived" classification's hierarchy into anything? The problem with LC classification is not that the hierarchy is bad -- it's extremely thorough and well thought out -- but that it's so rigid and hidebound. As Sandy Berman discovered, it cannot be changed from the bottom up, and once everything began to be standardized for the sake of sharing data, the idea of cataloguing "for the people" (and Sandy's job, unfortunately) went by the wayside. His subject headings have recently been revived on the Internet by some of the Code4Lib people. If I get your point, you are saying that his classification system, as well as LC's and anyone else's, could be included in an über-classification system that pointed to all related classes from central database. I wonder whether Open Library could be a rallying point for such an effort -- it would have to be fixed to be in line with FRBR first (separating works, expressions, and manifestations, for one thing), but that's an interesting idea.
Personally I think these debates about classification will fall by the wayside as systems like Google Books, and perhaps this new effort, really get going. As Google knows, nothing beats a full text search for locating all and every related piece of information. Classification will be for locating information (physically or digitally), perhaps for refining searches, and most certainly for the intellectual task of organizing information hierarchically. Full text search will be for finding (what you're looking for). In the real world, it's already that way to some extent, thanks to our Friends at Google, and that will intensify as Google Books heats up.
>>It bothers me greatly that libraries cull on a basis of popularity.
It bothers me, too, and a great number of other library people. I can't remember which library system it was that, a few years ago, didn't even give their discards to their Friends of the Library for fundraising, but dumped them into dumpsters. Tragic. At least, it is to me, but then again I'm one of those people who haunts used book stores and finds treasure in "trash".
S.R. Ranganathan wrote that "the library is a living organism", it must always change and grow in response to users' needs. Libraries need to cater to their users in order to continue being useful. Interlibrary loan exists to help them cope with the budgetary limitations that keep them from acquiring everything that users want - even newer books that don't fit the collection for whatever reason.
These discussions have been going on since the beginning of the modern public library, though. Even the "new technology" panic: there is a story that goes around about a librarian who questioned management's demand in the 1920s that she add a telephone to her desk, because it would just be in the way, and how would she ever get her work done while receiving telephone calls! Pick up any old book on librarianship and there is a lot of debate, especially about public libraries and what their responsibilities are to popular tastes vs. "good" literature.
>>My dream would be the Library of Congress becoming the online resource with... links to where you can buy OR borrow them
WorldCat provides this, at least for the borrowing part. If you want to shop for a book you find there, you can copy the ISBN number from WorldCat's record to Amazon.com or your favored online bookseller (or Google Books, for that matter).
Fortunately there is a way. Universities offer community cards to local users, usually for about $25 a year. With a community card, you can access science journals online, plus borrow from their book, music, etc. collections.
Personally, I find it depressing that so many people don't know that there are free libraries operating. They are generally called "public" libraries. Publishers don't sue them out of existence because libraries buy the copies of the books they circulate, and the publishers make money from that.
Go to worldcat, look up a book you like, and then type your zip code or city and state into the localization box - you'll probably find there's a copy near you that you can pick up at your local library for the price of filling out a form to get a library card. And if there isn't a copy of what you want in their collection, they'll get it for you from someone who has it, very likely for free.
>>many of these old texts, especially popular fiction from the late 1800s, have been discarded by meatspace libraries, so are otherwise pretty much unavailable
I agree that this is a problem - "meatspace" (ick) libraries have space limitations, and they usually base their "weeding", or removing of books from the collection, on circulation statistics. Most people these days don't want to read old, obscure 19th century novels (I'm an exception, like you). I find them in used bookstores.
I wish libraries had bigger budgets for acquisition and retention of unpopular books, but budgets are going toward the items that the majority of library users want and need - internet access, DVDs, CD's, audiobooks, and popular fiction and nonfiction book titles.
So maybe the space that Open Library is going to fill is having scanned copies of older books that aren't circulating, so they aren't in any library's collections (and are therefore being left out of WorldCat). I can see some value in that, especially the open source aspect of it.
I also agree that reading conventionally printed text on screen is easier on the eye, even with flaws and artifacts. But it's not something you can copy and paste from (except for Google Books).
>>The kinds of skills necessary for doing actual cataloging work.... classifying and organizing knowledge... are so rare as to be a very precious jewel of a person if you ever do find somebody like that.
Well said. I am working on an MLIS degree (yes, Virginia, there are still new librarians being trained) and just having learned the baby steps of cataloguing, I can tell you that it is not simple, for many of the reasons cited above. Most cataloguing is "copy cataloguing" - replicating the data provided by WorldCat, with the potential for some refinement if an item is of particular local interest. There are a lot of reasons for that, mostly to avoid duplication of effort, but also because libraries are constantly facing a budget squeeze with regard to staffing. Cataloguers aren't rare, but people who work full-time cataloguing for a library are. And because it's a skill best acquired through lots of practice, it's going to be a rarified art form in another decade.
>>the central clearing house for access to book information
Good luck to them, though they have an uphill climb ahead.
Putting aside LibraryThing for the moment, there already exists a central worldwide clearing house for access to book information: WorldCat, operated by OCLC.
OCLC is a pretty sharp bunch, and very tied in to Google as well as Google Books. They have already done the collective cataloguing of more than 1 billion items (and that includes audio books, music, videos, etc., as well as books), and their data warehouse grows with every book added to any of their 10,000 member libraries. LibraryThing, which is probably the leading contender for real competition to this project, has 16 million books.
Granted, the quality of the data in WorldCat is only as good as that provided to OCLC by those 10,000 libraries - but librarians are generally pretty picky about the quality of their data. And WorldCat can give more than the book information - it can give you you fast, free access to the actual book, in your hands, via your local public or academic library. As for virtual books, Google is working hard to corner that market.
Which isn't to say that this is not a worthwhile undertaking, just that they need to be aware of everything that's operating in the universe they want to be a part of.
> the innate curiosity that leads many young people, male or female, to go into any form of science dissipated in girls by middle school
SMARTgirls (Science and Math at the Right Time for Girls) brings together women who work in math, science and IT to teach little 1-hour classes to girls age 10-12, just to give them the exposure to something cool, to spark whatever interest they may have (and at the same time, demonstrate respect for their intellect, which is difficult to come by at that age, especially from their peers). I think this is a much better idea than the dumbing-down of the curriculum. Show teen girls role models, let them know that there are career possibilities in IT and that women can pursue them successfully, and college enrollments will rise a few years later.
> I am baffled that so few women seem to realize the amazing opportunities presented in IT
Agreed. I jumped in with both feet as soon as I found that I had any aptitude at all. It was much more interesting than clerical work, and paid twice as much. I learned enough to be a sysadmin. At the same time a friend from a previous job, who was younger than me by a few years, enrolled in college in an IT degree -- which I thought was funny at the time -- and was recruited straight out of graduation by a large high tech company. That reaffirmed my decision to go into the field -- I just wish I'd realized then that I should get out of my sysadmin job and go back to school and follow suit. Because I had a sysadmin job, I thought that I didn't need the degree. Fifteen years, several jobs, and one business later, it's now clear to me that having the degree might have made all the difference to my opportunities down the road.
Your ideas are some of the most cogent I've seen in comments on this thread.
As I was reading through some of the other comments, and thinking about what learning to program meant to me as a beginner, something occurred to me that might be another way to go. It's rather a radical idea, but the more I think about it, the more I like it.
Here's the idea: All first-year University students must take an entry-level programming class. They get to choose the flavor: something OOP for people who know what they're doing already, something simple, oh heck even Javascript, for people who've never had any exposure to programming before. But all the classes would introduce programming procedures and practices. People who already know what they're doing could test out of programming 101 just like they can test out of math 101 now.
Better yet, introduce programming in high school, and make some computer science compulsory for all students, just like English, Math, and (in some schools, these days) a foreign language. Require four years of English, three years of math, two years of a foreign language, and one year of computer science. Some students will show an aptitude and find that they like it, others will hate it and suffer. Just like they do now with math, English, and foreign languages.
Just as currently only a small group really get jazzed by writing and go into a creative writing major, only a small group would get jazzed by programming and go into a CS major. But you'd be more likely to catch more people who have some aptitude -- people of both genders, all backgrounds, and people with and without prior experience coding. Wouldn't the world be a better place for programmers if everybody with a BA or a BS had at least some inkling of what goes into writing a computer program?
Someone else posted that there is actually an effort to get more males into nursing, not to correct a perceived "gender imbalance" but simply to have more male nurses around to do things that larger, stronger people are good at (such as lifting and moving patients). I would add that having more males in a profession typically raises the esteem in which the profession is held, and salaries go up accordingly. (The converse is also true, unfortunately.)
I'm not sure I agree that the prestige of nurses is at all similar to the prestige of computer science graduates. It seems to me that because some of the world's wealthiest people are "computer science" guys (Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and a boatload of Microsoft Millionaires), it doesn't matter that the vast majority of CS grads work in lower-level jobs as grunt coders. The ones at the top of a profession define its prestige level, not the ones at the entry level. (If you're still not sure, think through this scenario: You're at a cocktail party and meet a well dressed woman. You ask her what she does for a living; she says, "I'm a nurse." Did your respect for her just go up, or down? My guess is down.)
But honestly, nobody should get into any profession for the prestige it offers. Get into something because you love it and want to do it for the rest of your life.
I think this is such a good point. My folks put no limits on what they thought I was capable of or what I "should" be interested in, although neither of them was into any kind of technology (except for my dad = photography as a hobby). My dad had a home office (in the pre-personal computer era) which was one of my playrooms. I learned to type on his electric typewriter when I was something like 7 years old. He also bought an Atari, which became almost exclusively my toy -- thank God my older brother had already moved out of the house, or that probably never would have happened. I also became proficient on a 10-key calculator at an early age and appreciated all of these things as things which I think is your point. No, I didn't take them apart, but I did get that they were functional objects, and that learning how to use them could be useful for work. I'm sure if I'd had exposure to computers at home, I would have gotten into programming earlier, but as it was I didn't do anything with a computer until I entered the workforce. (Unless you count the Coleco Football I carried with me everywhere in high school -- which made me a very geeky girl indeed, as this was in the 1970s!) I got into high tech in a sort of stereotypical way for a woman in the 1980s -- by being the only person in the office who wasn't afraid to fix the printer, and then following the database programmer around asking lots of questions about what he was doing and how everything worked. He ended up being my mentor and recommending me for my first techie job.
I think it's great that your friend is getting excited about what computer systems can do, but if CMU isn't going to teach her how to make them do anything herself, then I don't know how the program she's in can possibly be considered computer science.
I'm a woman but I would not want to do that program at CMU unless they would let me add real programming to the mix of classes. What's the point otherwise?
> she told me I should take a humanities course instead
Not unusual at all, and not limited to school either. I found myself laid off in the dot-bomb era, and when talking with an unemployment counselor, I brought up the idea of improving my programming skills with some focused training, or even an undergrad CS degree (I am a self-taught web programmer, with a humanities degree). He basically told me to forget about it -- there were "enough guys" out there who could already program, had lots of experience, and had also gotten laid off, so they would be looking for jobs. Besides, he asked me, didn't I want to have a career that would let me spend more time at home with my kid?
Like all people who find themselves out of work for the first time in their adult lives, I was in a panic. It was easy for him to talk me out of my goal, because he was able to convince me that my efforts would not pay off. That was 5 years ago, and now I've reinvested myself in a traditionally "female" field, so the CS path is probably permanently closed to me as a formal thing, although technology isn't.
For the record, I personally think dumbing down CS to attract women is the wrong approach. Women need role models and encouragement, not a patronizing attempt to make CS "easier" for us.
Just wanted to add another woman's voice to the discussion. It's cool to see women contributing to this thread, which is atypical of/.
Slashdot Mirror
>>you librarians
Thanks for the promotion. :)
>>the world needs more people doing the cataloging
I don't disagree. My point wasn't that non-experts shouldn't be enabled to do cataloguing, but that cataloguing is an art and that it takes practice to get good at it, whether you are a "trained" librarian or not.
Very few people get an MLIS to become "experts" - at cataloguing or anything else. (Most of my classmates in my cataloguing class hated doing the actual work of cataloguing, and I suspect it's always been that way.) Most get an MLIS because it's required to be considered for professional-level positions in libraries. That unfortunately makes it akin to a vocational degree, unless you strive to make it something more. The ALA has discussed standardizing MLIS curricula for ages, but that has yet to happen. Until the curriculum you get in an MLIS program is standardized, and those standards are adhered to for hiring and retention purposes (a la medical school followed by ongoing board certification), an MLIS will continue to be seen as a job ticket.
It's too bad that you took some outdated courses (they still exist, unfortunately, as anyone currently or just out of almost any MLIS program can tell you). But they definitely don't represent current thinking in information studies. All of the issues you bring up are being discussed in forward-thinking IS programs.
But I digress. My point is that cataloguing is complex - not because the AACR2 is full of arcane rules and strangely organized (although it is both), but because teasing out all the details can get very interesting. That's what makes cataloguing something more than "monotonous, tedious effort".
>>a folksonomy that could accommodate the hierarchy of each and every one of these ill conceived classifications
Why would you want to accomodate an "ill-conceived" classification's hierarchy into anything? The problem with LC classification is not that the hierarchy is bad -- it's extremely thorough and well thought out -- but that it's so rigid and hidebound. As Sandy Berman discovered, it cannot be changed from the bottom up, and once everything began to be standardized for the sake of sharing data, the idea of cataloguing "for the people" (and Sandy's job, unfortunately) went by the wayside. His subject headings have recently been revived on the Internet by some of the Code4Lib people. If I get your point, you are saying that his classification system, as well as LC's and anyone else's, could be included in an über-classification system that pointed to all related classes from central database. I wonder whether Open Library could be a rallying point for such an effort -- it would have to be fixed to be in line with FRBR first (separating works, expressions, and manifestations, for one thing), but that's an interesting idea.
Personally I think these debates about classification will fall by the wayside as systems like Google Books, and perhaps this new effort, really get going. As Google knows, nothing beats a full text search for locating all and every related piece of information. Classification will be for locating information (physically or digitally), perhaps for refining searches, and most certainly for the intellectual task of organizing information hierarchically. Full text search will be for finding (what you're looking for). In the real world, it's already that way to some extent, thanks to our Friends at Google, and that will intensify as Google Books heats up.
>>It bothers me greatly that libraries cull on a basis of popularity.
It bothers me, too, and a great number of other library people. I can't remember which library system it was that, a few years ago, didn't even give their discards to their Friends of the Library for fundraising, but dumped them into dumpsters. Tragic. At least, it is to me, but then again I'm one of those people who haunts used book stores and finds treasure in "trash".
S.R. Ranganathan wrote that "the library is a living organism", it must always change and grow in response to users' needs. Libraries need to cater to their users in order to continue being useful. Interlibrary loan exists to help them cope with the budgetary limitations that keep them from acquiring everything that users want - even newer books that don't fit the collection for whatever reason.
These discussions have been going on since the beginning of the modern public library, though. Even the "new technology" panic: there is a story that goes around about a librarian who questioned management's demand in the 1920s that she add a telephone to her desk, because it would just be in the way, and how would she ever get her work done while receiving telephone calls! Pick up any old book on librarianship and there is a lot of debate, especially about public libraries and what their responsibilities are to popular tastes vs. "good" literature.
>>My dream would be the Library of Congress becoming the online resource with ... links to where you can buy OR borrow them
WorldCat provides this, at least for the borrowing part. If you want to shop for a book you find there, you can copy the ISBN number from WorldCat's record to Amazon.com or your favored online bookseller (or Google Books, for that matter).
>>searching on "Ogorkiewicz" in IPL yielded no hits, while OL gave me several
Worldcat yielded 80 hits, which could be refined by author and included works in which Ogorkiewicz' work is cited.
>>a way to get access to science journals
Fortunately there is a way. Universities offer community cards to local users, usually for about $25 a year. With a community card, you can access science journals online, plus borrow from their book, music, etc. collections.
>>a free library system today
Personally, I find it depressing that so many people don't know that there are free libraries operating. They are generally called "public" libraries. Publishers don't sue them out of existence because libraries buy the copies of the books they circulate, and the publishers make money from that.
Go to worldcat, look up a book you like, and then type your zip code or city and state into the localization box - you'll probably find there's a copy near you that you can pick up at your local library for the price of filling out a form to get a library card. And if there isn't a copy of what you want in their collection, they'll get it for you from someone who has it, very likely for free.
>>many of these old texts, especially popular fiction from the late 1800s, have been discarded by meatspace libraries, so are otherwise pretty much unavailable
I agree that this is a problem - "meatspace" (ick) libraries have space limitations, and they usually base their "weeding", or removing of books from the collection, on circulation statistics. Most people these days don't want to read old, obscure 19th century novels (I'm an exception, like you). I find them in used bookstores.
I wish libraries had bigger budgets for acquisition and retention of unpopular books, but budgets are going toward the items that the majority of library users want and need - internet access, DVDs, CD's, audiobooks, and popular fiction and nonfiction book titles.
So maybe the space that Open Library is going to fill is having scanned copies of older books that aren't circulating, so they aren't in any library's collections (and are therefore being left out of WorldCat). I can see some value in that, especially the open source aspect of it.
I also agree that reading conventionally printed text on screen is easier on the eye, even with flaws and artifacts. But it's not something you can copy and paste from (except for Google Books).
>>The kinds of skills necessary for doing actual cataloging work.... classifying and organizing knowledge... are so rare as to be a very precious jewel of a person if you ever do find somebody like that.
Well said. I am working on an MLIS degree (yes, Virginia, there are still new librarians being trained) and just having learned the baby steps of cataloguing, I can tell you that it is not simple, for many of the reasons cited above. Most cataloguing is "copy cataloguing" - replicating the data provided by WorldCat, with the potential for some refinement if an item is of particular local interest. There are a lot of reasons for that, mostly to avoid duplication of effort, but also because libraries are constantly facing a budget squeeze with regard to staffing. Cataloguers aren't rare, but people who work full-time cataloguing for a library are. And because it's a skill best acquired through lots of practice, it's going to be a rarified art form in another decade.
>>the central clearing house for access to book information
Good luck to them, though they have an uphill climb ahead.
Putting aside LibraryThing for the moment, there already exists a central worldwide clearing house for access to book information: WorldCat, operated by OCLC.
OCLC is a pretty sharp bunch, and very tied in to Google as well as Google Books. They have already done the collective cataloguing of more than 1 billion items (and that includes audio books, music, videos, etc., as well as books), and their data warehouse grows with every book added to any of their 10,000 member libraries. LibraryThing, which is probably the leading contender for real competition to this project, has 16 million books.
Granted, the quality of the data in WorldCat is only as good as that provided to OCLC by those 10,000 libraries - but librarians are generally pretty picky about the quality of their data. And WorldCat can give more than the book information - it can give you you fast, free access to the actual book, in your hands, via your local public or academic library. As for virtual books, Google is working hard to corner that market.
Which isn't to say that this is not a worthwhile undertaking, just that they need to be aware of everything that's operating in the universe they want to be a part of.
> the innate curiosity that leads many young people, male or female, to go into any form of science dissipated in girls by middle school
SMARTgirls (Science and Math at the Right Time for Girls) brings together women who work in math, science and IT to teach little 1-hour classes to girls age 10-12, just to give them the exposure to something cool, to spark whatever interest they may have (and at the same time, demonstrate respect for their intellect, which is difficult to come by at that age, especially from their peers). I think this is a much better idea than the dumbing-down of the curriculum. Show teen girls role models, let them know that there are career possibilities in IT and that women can pursue them successfully, and college enrollments will rise a few years later.
> I am baffled that so few women seem to realize the amazing opportunities presented in IT
Agreed. I jumped in with both feet as soon as I found that I had any aptitude at all. It was much more interesting than clerical work, and paid twice as much. I learned enough to be a sysadmin. At the same time a friend from a previous job, who was younger than me by a few years, enrolled in college in an IT degree -- which I thought was funny at the time -- and was recruited straight out of graduation by a large high tech company. That reaffirmed my decision to go into the field -- I just wish I'd realized then that I should get out of my sysadmin job and go back to school and follow suit. Because I had a sysadmin job, I thought that I didn't need the degree. Fifteen years, several jobs, and one business later, it's now clear to me that having the degree might have made all the difference to my opportunities down the road.
> girls are rarely told, "You seem to like computers. Why not make a career out of it?"
In point of fact, I was told, "You can't be a programmer. Programming requires logic, and you're a woman."
Your ideas are some of the most cogent I've seen in comments on this thread.
As I was reading through some of the other comments, and thinking about what learning to program meant to me as a beginner, something occurred to me that might be another way to go. It's rather a radical idea, but the more I think about it, the more I like it.
Here's the idea: All first-year University students must take an entry-level programming class. They get to choose the flavor: something OOP for people who know what they're doing already, something simple, oh heck even Javascript, for people who've never had any exposure to programming before. But all the classes would introduce programming procedures and practices. People who already know what they're doing could test out of programming 101 just like they can test out of math 101 now.
Better yet, introduce programming in high school, and make some computer science compulsory for all students, just like English, Math, and (in some schools, these days) a foreign language. Require four years of English, three years of math, two years of a foreign language, and one year of computer science. Some students will show an aptitude and find that they like it, others will hate it and suffer. Just like they do now with math, English, and foreign languages.
Just as currently only a small group really get jazzed by writing and go into a creative writing major, only a small group would get jazzed by programming and go into a CS major. But you'd be more likely to catch more people who have some aptitude -- people of both genders, all backgrounds, and people with and without prior experience coding. Wouldn't the world be a better place for programmers if everybody with a BA or a BS had at least some inkling of what goes into writing a computer program?
Someone else posted that there is actually an effort to get more males into nursing, not to correct a perceived "gender imbalance" but simply to have more male nurses around to do things that larger, stronger people are good at (such as lifting and moving patients). I would add that having more males in a profession typically raises the esteem in which the profession is held, and salaries go up accordingly. (The converse is also true, unfortunately.) I'm not sure I agree that the prestige of nurses is at all similar to the prestige of computer science graduates. It seems to me that because some of the world's wealthiest people are "computer science" guys (Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and a boatload of Microsoft Millionaires), it doesn't matter that the vast majority of CS grads work in lower-level jobs as grunt coders. The ones at the top of a profession define its prestige level, not the ones at the entry level. (If you're still not sure, think through this scenario: You're at a cocktail party and meet a well dressed woman. You ask her what she does for a living; she says, "I'm a nurse." Did your respect for her just go up, or down? My guess is down.) But honestly, nobody should get into any profession for the prestige it offers. Get into something because you love it and want to do it for the rest of your life.
I think this is such a good point. My folks put no limits on what they thought I was capable of or what I "should" be interested in, although neither of them was into any kind of technology (except for my dad = photography as a hobby). My dad had a home office (in the pre-personal computer era) which was one of my playrooms. I learned to type on his electric typewriter when I was something like 7 years old. He also bought an Atari, which became almost exclusively my toy -- thank God my older brother had already moved out of the house, or that probably never would have happened. I also became proficient on a 10-key calculator at an early age and appreciated all of these things as things which I think is your point. No, I didn't take them apart, but I did get that they were functional objects, and that learning how to use them could be useful for work. I'm sure if I'd had exposure to computers at home, I would have gotten into programming earlier, but as it was I didn't do anything with a computer until I entered the workforce. (Unless you count the Coleco Football I carried with me everywhere in high school -- which made me a very geeky girl indeed, as this was in the 1970s!) I got into high tech in a sort of stereotypical way for a woman in the 1980s -- by being the only person in the office who wasn't afraid to fix the printer, and then following the database programmer around asking lots of questions about what he was doing and how everything worked. He ended up being my mentor and recommending me for my first techie job.
I think it's great that your friend is getting excited about what computer systems can do, but if CMU isn't going to teach her how to make them do anything herself, then I don't know how the program she's in can possibly be considered computer science. I'm a woman but I would not want to do that program at CMU unless they would let me add real programming to the mix of classes. What's the point otherwise?
> she told me I should take a humanities course instead
/.
Not unusual at all, and not limited to school either. I found myself laid off in the dot-bomb era, and when talking with an unemployment counselor, I brought up the idea of improving my programming skills with some focused training, or even an undergrad CS degree (I am a self-taught web programmer, with a humanities degree). He basically told me to forget about it -- there were "enough guys" out there who could already program, had lots of experience, and had also gotten laid off, so they would be looking for jobs. Besides, he asked me, didn't I want to have a career that would let me spend more time at home with my kid?
Like all people who find themselves out of work for the first time in their adult lives, I was in a panic. It was easy for him to talk me out of my goal, because he was able to convince me that my efforts would not pay off. That was 5 years ago, and now I've reinvested myself in a traditionally "female" field, so the CS path is probably permanently closed to me as a formal thing, although technology isn't.
For the record, I personally think dumbing down CS to attract women is the wrong approach. Women need role models and encouragement, not a patronizing attempt to make CS "easier" for us.
Just wanted to add another woman's voice to the discussion. It's cool to see women contributing to this thread, which is atypical of