What tech advice would you give to students and soon-to-be grads?

[Danielle Robichaud]

I often get asked by students and soon-to-be grads what skills or courses they should focus in on. As a co-op student, and later as a new graduate, I worked on information management, enterprise search, Web 2.0 and social media type projects. The experience continues to prove invaluable in more traditional library- and archives-based work environments, but it also means I'm qualified to work in government, corporate and non-library environments. With that in mind, I often encourage people to explore topics that fall outside the realm of reference, collection development or reader advisory even if it's only for the length of a workshop or elective course. Examples include topics such as metadata, search optimization, electronic records management, subject classification and analysis, database management, basic HTML, MediaWiki markup, usability and web design best practices, etc. 

If asked a similar question, what tech skills would your recommend to up and comers? What courses do you think are essential? Are there topics you think everyone should at least be familiar with? Would you have done anything differently while picking school courses? 

[Sara Allain]

Thanks for the question, Danielle!

I'm really lucky to have student employees who are interested in librarianship as a profession - this past spring, I wrote reference letters for four students who applied to library school - so I get a lot of opportunities to wax poetic about my job. However, I try to make it really clear, every time I talk to them, that librarians aren't just book pushers. The job market being what it is, it's smart to hedge your bets and think about which skills are transferable - like database/data management, project management, and records management (all the managements, really).

For me, in terms of tech skills, I think the most important thing was getting used to the command line. Learning a bit of unix, some bash, and how to use git were really formative in making me comfortable with tech. Also important was learning a bit of coding/programming - I started with HTML and CSS, then worked my way up to Javascript, jQuery, and a smidgen of Ruby and Python over the course of about a year. I'm not a programmer, but understanding the possibilities that these languages present - and what makes them different from each other - are good things to know if you think you'll have to talk to programmers on a regular basis.

There are probably a ton of other things, but to sum up in three points:

1. Take the classes that teach you to manage stuff. Those will be important.

2. Get comfortable with your computer. Try creating a git repository from the command line! It's daunting but it will teach you a ton. Git in 15 minutes: https://try.github.io

3. Take some coding classes, either in a collaborative low-risk situation like Software Carpentry or Ladies Learning Code or online somewhere like Codecademy.

I hope this is helpful!

Sara