How I use my knowledge in Library/Information Sciences to be a better Data Engineer
First of all, I’d like to start talking about something that most people in the tech field hate, but know that they should be creating: documentation. Back in university, one of the things that you’d hear in every class is to preserve and document everything that’s important, so my mentality since I started in the DE field was that I had to document the processes that were important, because if I left that project and someone had to use what I made, or to work with the process that I changed, I had to have a good documentation (by good, I mean a text were that person could find every important thing about that automation/standardization or some other type of work, reducing the most that I could the need to speak to me to use/repair/make changes in that specific work).
The second thing I learned in my Library Sciences course was to classificate, librarians can classificate anything, there was one project that I was working where we had a lot of problems with the event/tags maps, there was no standardization and everyone that made a map was doing something different, so I used my knowledge, and the Colon Theory by Ranganathan to classificate the type of events we were working with, after that I was able to create a better way to create new maps. Also, we had to work with the folders of the software we used to manage and create the maps, as it was not organized enough, exaggerating, it was on the edge of chaos.
The last thing I have to say here is that organization is not something that comes from within, I had four years to learn what it was to organize and treat information so it was a long way, and this is something that I will always cherish about my field of origin, now I can work in a more organized way because of the knowledge I acquired.
Finally, I reckon we have a lot to learn from information science in the computer science and data science fields, we have to be always in touch with those areas, regardless of which one you’re from, they all have something to teach, and we all need to keep on learning each day.
