Demystifying jargon for librarians (and a spot of Perl)

[Edith Speller]

I'm not the only one that gets confused by mentions of RESTful models, JSON, GET vs POST and all that sort of thing, am I? I like to think I'm a geek but in honesty I'm both inexperienced and lacking the time in my day job to keep up with developments.

So, my suggestion is this: would a kindly techie be able to take a bemused librarian (or several if others feel the same) under his/her wing tomorrow and explain the more obscure jargon, either when it comes up or afterwards over pizza/beer? In exchange perhaps us library types could shed light on esoteric library jargon... This might work as part of the twitter backchannel if explanations could be kept brief enough.

My other request for help is with a Perl script which another library gave me to allow us to generate RSS feeds. It's clunky, needs finessing and I have no idea where to start, so someone taking a quick look at it would be fantastic!

[Owen Stephens]

I've added a Jargon Busting forum at http://mashedlibrary.ning.com/forum/topics/jargon-busting - if people post one word/phrase posts then hopefully others can pitch in and explain it (or point at some good resources)

Happy to look at perl scripts during the day (a little while since I did any serious programming, but I was once reasonably good with Perl)