care to be interviewed for a book on libraries using code?

[Andromeda Yelton]

Hey y'all - I’m writing a Library Technology Report for ALA TechSource on use cases for lightweight coding in libraries and archives. I was hoping some of you had written some short programs you’d be willing to answer a few questions about.  I'd also love suggestions as to whom I should talk to; I’m very eager to talk to diverse librarians and archivists from a wide variety of institutions and roles.

Part of the motivation for writing this is I want to generate a good list of first-real-projects: things that should be pretty accessible to new coders, and also useful.  (Perhaps as a bonus they can be used to justify professional development expenses to employers. :)

Thanks in advance!

Andromeda

Questions:


* What is your institution and job title?

* How much of your job is about coding?  Do you have any formal code responsibilities, or is this simply a skill that you bring to your formal responsibilities?

* Have you had support from your employer in learning to code/spending your time on coding?

* What would you recommend to someone who wanted to learn to write code like yours?

* If you're a manager, have you provided support to employees in learning to code? Why/why not? What sort of support?

For the following questions, please pick a short program (less than a hundred-ish lines) that you wrote to do some library/archives task.  If you have more than one you’d like to talk about, feel free to answer these for each program.

* What language was this code written in?

* What was the impact of the code? (time saved, new/improved service to patrons, etc.)

* Is the code publicly available anywhere? If not, would you mind making it so (under some clear license), or sending it to me with permission to excerpt it in the report?

* What did you learn from implementing this code?

[ni...@satifice.com]

Wait, are you looking for people to answer these questions?

I could do this.

And I mean, the project I have in mind is a tiny, tiny program.

[ni...@satifice.com]

I'm answering in line below!

On Thursday, May 29, 2014 11:17:46 AM UTC-4, Andromeda Yelton wrote:

> Hey y'all - I’m writing a Library Technology Report for ALA TechSource on use cases for lightweight coding in libraries and archives. I was hoping some of you had written some short programs you’d be willing to answer a few questions about.  I'd also love suggestions as to whom I should talk to; I’m very eager to talk to diverse librarians and archivists from a wide variety of institutions and roles.
>
>
>
> Part of the motivation for writing this is I want to generate a good list of first-real-projects: things that should be pretty accessible to new coders, and also useful.  (Perhaps as a bonus they can be used to justify professional development expenses to employers. :)
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> Andromeda
>
> Questions:
>
>
> * What is your institution and job title?

I'm the Digital Projects Librarian (Part-time) at York University.

> * How much of your job is about coding?  Do you have any formal code responsibilities, or is this simply a skill that you bring to your formal responsibilities?

None of my job is about coding and I don't have any formal code responsibilities. It also isn't a skill that I had *before* my current position (and arguably it is barely a skill I have now).

> * Have you had support from your employer in learning to code/spending your time on coding?

I don't have explicit support, but they have been generally supportive of my efforts (when I can find places to deploy them) and definitely are interested/supportive when I suggest projects that would require me to expand my coding knowledge. Then again, I am only part-time so I do spend some of my out of office hours trying to build up my skills.

> * What would you recommend to someone who wanted to learn to write code like yours?

For my particular code? All they really need is familiarity with the unix/linux command line, since it is just a bash script. This familiarity is necessary because one really needs to understand what is possible with the command line before you start writing a script like this. After that... all you need is good Googling skills (which is basically how I got this script written).

> * If you're a manager, have you provided support to employees in learning to code? Why/why not? What sort of support?
>
>
>
>
> For the following questions, please pick a short program (less than a hundred-ish lines) that you wrote to do some library/archives task.  If you have more than one you’d like to talk about, feel free to answer these for each program.
>
>
> * What language was this code written in?

This is a bash script. I don't even know if there is a specific name for the language used in bash scripting...

> * What was the impact of the code? (time saved, new/improved service to patrons, etc.)

This was definitely a time saved situation. For all that this tiny script took me a long time to write (maybe three or four days to get it working properly), it saved me a lot of tedious hours of slowly (manually) going through database tables and spreadsheets to get the data I needed. And now I can use the script whenever I need to get this kind of data out of DSpace again (which I'm sure will happen).

> * Is the code publicly available anywhere? If not, would you mind making it so (under some clear license), or sending it to me with permission to excerpt it in the report?

The code is publicly available on my github account:

https://github.com/satifice/little-helpers/blob/master/ExportDSpaceMetadata.sh

And it is under a MIT license, so you have no worries there!

> * What did you learn from implementing this code?

I think this was my first step out of the shallow end in the command line environment. Before this script I was largely a "copy this command and paste" type of user. After the script, I understand the linux/unix environment a lot more and feel much, much more comfortable using it to solve problems.