The tangle of cords under the printer station has gotten out of hand. The server keeps crashing, and you can’t get it fixed fast enough. You want an institutional repository, and someone to run it. Your web page is a disaster. Whatever the reason, you want a systems librarian.

Or do you?

The hard fact is that die-hard systems librarians are still a rare breed, hard to find and hard to hire. Moreover, a systems librarian may not be what you think a systems librarian should be. It pays to consider your requirements carefully before you start the hiring process.

Questions to ask yourself:

• What are this hire’s central duties? If 90% of this hire’s time involves hardware and software troubleshooting, you are wasting a good MLS if you ask for a systems librarian; try for a computer technician instead. If, on the other hand, you want someone to handle metadata or grant-writing or management or reference-desk duties as well as database work or web design, a systems librarian is perfectly appropriate.
• Is this a one-time or ongoing problem? Don’t hire a systems librarian to do a one-time website revamp; engage a contractor. Hire a systems librarian when you need someone to keep that website growing in the long term.
• Do I understand what I’m asking for? If you don’t, you may pass over an excellent hire because s/he doesn’t have the precise buzzwords in your job description. If you ask for XML and PHP, you shouldn’t eliminate a candidate who knows MODS and Perl, because MODS is XML and a Perl programmer can pick up PHP.
• Do I expect this hire to put together a major library system from zero? You will likely be disappointed. If systems librarians are rare, librarians who are also serious software developers are all but nonexistent. (Those few that exist are real gems!) Systems librarians tend to be technology generalists, able to do a little bit of a lot of things and quick to learn new skills. However, they rarely match the depth of training, skill, and experience of a career software engineer, database administrator, information architect, or other computer professional. A systems librarian may be able to glue together a system out of existing pieces, but s/he will have trouble building it from nothing.
• What commitment will I make to keeping this hire up-to-date technically? Just like other librarians, systems librarians need to learn or they get stale. Techie skills, unfortunately, tend to go stale quite quickly. Can you buy tech books? Spring for classes? Or will you act suspicious when your systems librarian asks to go to a non-library technical conference?
• Are existing staff ready to welcome this hire? Technology-averse librarians embitter a systems librarian’s life, whereupon the systems librarian will embitter everyone else’s lives! Do what you can to assess your staff’s attitude, and try to nip resentment in the bud before the hiring process even starts. This is especially important if the money (or line) for this hire came from another department.

Pitfalls to avoid include the laundry-list job description. Sure, it’d be nice to have someone who can kick-start a printer, put together a desktop machine from scraps, re-architect a website, do Gantt charts for the library’s technology projects, write a MARC-DC crosswalk, performance-tune the ILS database, and build a custom IM bot. It won’t happen. (I invented the preceding list, but in sober truth, I’ve seen descriptions almost that bad.)

It can help to add someone from IT to a hiring committee, if possible. The IT committee member can help educate the committee on technical matters and assess candidates’ technical talent, leaving the rest of the committee more time to focus on non-technical skills, librarianship, and fit.

Consider also the possibility of developing rather than hiring systems talent. Ask around among your staff; is there a librarian they go to when computer-related things go wrong? Just like reference skills, cataloguing, and collection development, computer skills are learned. There’s no earthly reason someone who already shows talent can’t learn more. Training is assuredly an expensive, lengthy process—but so is hiring.

I’m sure I haven’t covered every wrinkle in hiring a systems librarian; I invite further comments. Computers are versatile tools; libraries who manage them well have a leg up.