I am a little slow coming off of this holiday weekend. My brain is still waiting and begging for that little jolt of caffeine from my morning coke. A bad, unhealthy habit, and one that I am constantly breaking then restarting. I don't like coffee, but I positively drool over a nice frosty cold coke in the morning.

This morning as I sorted through my email and snail mail, I was reading through my blog feeds and found the LibrarianInBlack mentioned that David Lee King has some great articles regarding communication between the techies and the non-techies. Most of the articles are about the techies talking to non-techies. Which are good articles if you are faced with the non-techie librarian or patron. Believe it or not but you may not think of yourself as techie, but to somebody out there, you are.

Sometimes the problem can lie not only within the department (one techie librarian communicating with a non-techie librarian) but it also occurs between separate departments. The most common is the ongoing battle between librarians and their hospital IT departments. Each librarian has their own horror story depicting their institutional version of Gettysburg with the IT department. In a way it is a technology Civil War. Both departments under one institution battling for control.

Check out the Information Technology Barriers faced by Hospital Librarians, compiled by the Hospital Internet Access Task Force. Not every hospital librarian faces each one of these problems, but a great many (including myself) have had to tackle and still are dealing with one or many of these problems.

So how does a hospital librarian who may be a solo librarian deal with this. First of all don't throw up your arms in defeat, that will get you and the library on the first speed boat to being obsolete. LEARN, LEARN, LEARN! Most librarians do not have an undergraduate or graduate degree in computers, MIS, and anything technical. But we are great learners!

Learn about what IP ranges are and if you share them how it will make your life a living hell. Learn the language of the techies. That way you can communicate with them. Because once you can start to communicate with them you can start to explain why opening a hole the Firewall (terrifying thought to the IT department) to install and run Ariel (or another electronic document delivery) software is necessary to help doctors get their needed information quickly.

Be patient, get to know a lot of the IT people, find the ones that can be your allies, and be nicely tenacious. Be willing to table some things (control over your intranet page) to solve bigger issues (shared IP ranges). Try and approach it in terms of them helping you to increase your department and hospital's return on investment on their research resources.

Finally, don't quit. Be nice, but be tenacious. Sometimes I think my picture is on a dart board in the break room at the IT department's building, but through my persistence I have gotten to know some people who are now willing to work with me and listen to my needs. Hey that is a step. Rome was not build in a day. I had one IT guy tell me that he never knew that librarians were this much into technology and that the rest of the system's IT department is starting to see me at the forefront of my hospital system's libraries. That made my day....hell that made my week.