As somebody who does tier III support for an enterprise software company, I can say that if you're working with a company that you have maintenance contracts with, calling your sales rep is one of the best ways to turbo your way up to the higher levels of support, especially if you're a big customer or make vague hints that you might become one soon. A huge part of the sales rep or customer relations person's job is walking over to the tech support department and begging some upper tier support person to help out their irate customer. It's also one of the quickest ways to make all of upper tier support utterly loathe you, which in the long run is a bad idea. So I would advise only doing this if you've got a truly serious problem, or if you're planning on not being a long-term customer...
Exactly. A librarian once told me, "If we're not pissing somebody off, we're not doing our job." Libraries are and should be a source of controversy and a haven for dissent. You can't have a democracy without giving people the opportunity to know what their choices are, what the unpopular opinion is.
I doubt it. Someone still has to understand the standards, how it all fits together. Your library catalog might have a slick user interface, but there's a lot more to library science than just the dewey decimal system. (If you don't believe me, knock yourself out reading MARC standards, for starters). Librarians will do more and more with technology, but somebody needs to understand at a deep level how the technology maps to the underlying standards and practices, and if AI has taught us anything, it's that it's a lot harder to encode human expertise than you might think. Knowing how to (re)search is far from a trivial skill, and knowing how to assign meaning or metadata to data is something I think computers will never be able to do as well as humans.
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Library of Congress call number for normal stuff; Sudoc numbers for gov't publications.
As somebody who does tier III support for an enterprise software company, I can say that if you're working with a company that you have maintenance contracts with, calling your sales rep is one of the best ways to turbo your way up to the higher levels of support, especially if you're a big customer or make vague hints that you might become one soon. A huge part of the sales rep or customer relations person's job is walking over to the tech support department and begging some upper tier support person to help out their irate customer. It's also one of the quickest ways to make all of upper tier support utterly loathe you, which in the long run is a bad idea. So I would advise only doing this if you've got a truly serious problem, or if you're planning on not being a long-term customer...
Exactly. A librarian once told me, "If we're not pissing somebody off, we're not doing our job." Libraries are and should be a source of controversy and a haven for dissent. You can't have a democracy without giving people the opportunity to know what their choices are, what the unpopular opinion is.
I doubt it. Someone still has to understand the standards, how it all fits together. Your library catalog might have a slick user interface, but there's a lot more to library science than just the dewey decimal system. (If you don't believe me, knock yourself out reading MARC standards, for starters). Librarians will do more and more with technology, but somebody needs to understand at a deep level how the technology maps to the underlying standards and practices, and if AI has taught us anything, it's that it's a lot harder to encode human expertise than you might think. Knowing how to (re)search is far from a trivial skill, and knowing how to assign meaning or metadata to data is something I think computers will never be able to do as well as humans.
or if you're using python, all you gotta do is
Array.get((x,y), '#')
where # is the symbol for a wall. gotta love those default values.