Through much of my early librarian/I.T. director career I observed a strong tension between law libraries and I.T. at many academic institutions. Part of this could be attributed to the rapid growth of I.T. as we moved through the early personal computer and networks age, and part of it because library science and librarians were feeling the ground shaking under them as disintermediation became stronger. I think the tension has lessened in recent years, though it still exists in some places. In 2007 I was part of an institute that focused on the relationship of law librarians and legal technologists. Inspired by S.R. Ranganathan’s “Five Laws of Library Science,” a fundamental set of precepts taught to library students, I offered five principles of library/technologist interaction. They are not as elegant as Ranganathan’s laws, and likely not as universally true. I offer them for whatever use you care to make of them.

1. Every organization is unique, but not so unique that it cannot benefit from adopting or adapting positive practices from other successful organizations.
2. Blaming professional relationship problems on personality is a crutch. Every organization is the sum of its members’ weighted personalities. You will not resolve a problem by changing a co-worker’s personality, nor should you try. Your goal is not to make the co-worker your best friend or your significant other; rather, it is to work together productively to accomplish the organization’s goals.
3. Your organization has customers, whether you choose to call them end users, patrons, students, clients, or whatever. Optimize your work to serve your customers’ needs.
4. Whatever complaint a librarian may have about technologists, technologists have an equal and opposite complaint about librarians. The converse is also true. Most of these complaints fester because neither openly discusses the issue and potential solutions.
5. No one knows the priority of a given need unless the owner of that need states its priority.