Took me an hour to find this, so I’ll post it here before I lose it again.

It’s a dead-on criticism of the wasteful, unnecessary gulf (sometimes, opposition) between two complementary professions. Progress has been made since the article was written, and the camps have, to a degree, merged at a small, almond-shaped area of overlap. This is the career avenue I’m trying to weasel my way into.

Since you asked, I would say that librarians have probably learned less about developing software than “computer people” have learned about cataloging, but not by much (what better example than myself?). Nevertheless, developers trying to manage electronic resources waste a lot of sweat reinventing the wheel, simply because they don’t associate what people do in libraries with what they’re trying to do. The criticism that libraries are out of touch because they represent old technology and a pre-Web approach to information could just as easily be restated in the other direction: the Web suffers from the delusion that information management is a new problem requiring a new science.

Anyway:

"Librarians are at a disadvantage because, to generalize shamelessly about the profession as a whole, they can never quite understand the technology as well as the people who invent it. While many librarians are struggling valiantly to keep up with runaway technology, they are continually in a position of reacting to rather than originating change. Add to that the budgetary constraints facing many libraries today, and the result is that creative insights from library science are woefully underrepresented in the evolution of Internet tools and resources.

"Computer people, for their part, have some handicaps as well. One handicap is a lack of understanding of library science. Computer people are continually trying to reinvent concepts which librarians have been honing for decades. Librarians who attend Internet developers’ conferences [...] sometimes refer to the discussions of cataloging which take place there as ‘library school kindergarten’."

[Riddle, P. (1994). Library culture, computer culture, and the Internet haystack. Found at http://prentissriddle.com/dl94.shtml]