Those who serve as systems librarians - the librarians and their staff who install, maintain, and sometimes further develop the IT systems on which the library depends - need a vast range of skills and tools to support their efforts. So many in fact that it is rare for a single individual to ever reach the end of their professional development.

For this reason, the continuing professional development (CPD) of those who serve as systems librarians is vital to the overall capacity of a library to meet its needs. In order to enhance the capacities of individuals working on the IT systems used by libraries, the eIFL-FOSS program wants to

1. encourage the organisation of local and regional training events that focus primarily on skills and tools, and
   
2. develop materials to help each eIFL-FOSS country coordinator and his or her colleagues organise and run such events.

A training event in this case can be as simple as inviting in someone who has a particular skill and getting them to share that skill and how to develop it. Or a training event could be a substantial, multi-day workshop in which skills development would be one key strand. You will know best what will work in your library or in your library consortium. What matters most is to identify the the skills and tools on which you wish to focus, and put a plan of action into motion.

What are the skills employed by systems librarians?

The answer to this question will vary. The following list of typical skills came from consultations with a small set of library IT professionals. It is presented merely as a starting point. Please help us to expand this list in order to make it comprehensive and to ensure it covers the full range of skills and tools used and needed by your library staff. What skills do you use regularly as a library IT professional? What skills do you see others using and wish you also had?

Key Areas

System administration skills (UNIX):

• understand how to apply basic permissions schemes (chown / chmod) for users and groups
• OpenSSH configuration and usage for securely administering remote machines, transferring files, setting up remote backups via phrasesless keys
• vim or emacs fo editing text files remotely
• Perl or Python and shell scripting for basic system automation jobs
• crontab for setting up scheduled jobs
• system backups

System administration skills (Windows):

• ntfstools for resetting the administrator password on systems
• ability to poke through system logs to find problem events and search for possible resolutions on the web from reputable sources

Hardware skills:

• system imaging (CloneZillam partimage, or the like) to automate rollout of machines
• basic hardware troubleshooting - checking cable connections, installing and configuring drivers

Software configuration skills:

• XML: parse and generate well-formed XML, and potentially XSLST too
• SQL: create and use basic relational models in MySQL or PostgreSQL (CREATE, UPDATE, SELECT with joins, DELETE)
• using JavaScript, JSON, AJAX for integrating Web services into applications
• one or more of Perl, Python, PHP, Java - to troubleshoot / customize applications in the most popular open source languages
• creating and applying patches with diff and patch
• version control with one or more of subversion, git, bazaar - to keep your own configuration files and customizations safe and enable rollback if things go badly

Communication skills:

• IRC - existence of and etiquette
• mailing lists - how to ask a question and etiquette
• bug reporting systems - how to search for an existing bug report that matches your problemm how to report your problem
• bug reporting systems - how to set up your own bug reporting system to manage your workload / workload of assistants

Library specific skills:

• basic understandiong of MARC format and how it relates to cataloguing standards - including MARC21 vs UNIMARC, MARC vs MARCXML
• using Perl + MARC::Record / Python + pyMARC / PHP + File_MARC / Java + marc4j / yaz tools / MarcEdit to parse and manipulate MARC records
• basic understanding of how Z39.50, SRU, OAI-PMH work