Robert Baron wrote:
"users of home-grown systems are often forced to depend for support
entirely on their developer. We all know what pressures are brought
to bear on in-house developers that
often drive them to a de-facto inability to meet the demands of
their
clients.  And it is often not their own fault, but, rather, a
frequent
consequence of underfunding and understaffing. "

Again, I could not agree more: but I guess the point I want to make
is that I want my users to have the greatest possible control over
the design of their system at the lowest possible price, and my
solution to that is to empower them with knowledge (the old "teach
'em to fish instead of giving them a fish" trick) so that they know
enough about what is possible from a computer system to be able to
demand what they want, not accept no for an answer, and even lend a
hand. Many years ago a Bell Labs supervisor said to me that when
they were looking for people to write readable computer
documentation, it was a lot easier to teach an English major about
computers than it was to teach computer programmers how to write; I
think that applies to the extremely complex tasks of analysis and
curation that only the sophisticated pattern-analysis capabilities
of a human brain can perform, and it's just relatively easy to teach
people who are already very good symbol-processors to do a little
more to take control of their tools. And all of us, I would guess,
are beginning to experience a decline in computer-illiteracy as
younger people enter the profession, which, together with more
versatile and user-friendly database systems, will eventually make
the whole discussion moot.

Pat Galloway
MS Dept. of Archives and History