Introductions

[Libraries Learning Code]

Who are you? Where do you work and what do you do? Why do you want to learn code or other tech skills?

[Sara Allain]

I'm Sara Allain, the Special Collections Librarian in the Digital Scholarship Unit at UofT Scarborough. Most of the time, I work in digital curation and digital collections development, which means that I spend a lot of my time manipulating data - images, text, metadata - and jamming it in to Islandora or Drupal. I also configure our various faculty sites.

The reason I wanted to start this group is simple - I spent my time at grad school thinking I could be a non-digital processing archivist. As you might be able to tell from the above, that's not what I'm doing! I certainly love that I've ended up in library tech, but being self-taught is hard. It would be much easier for me, you, and everyone else if we could facilitate more formal discussions around learning opportunities and strategies to bring tech skills to like-minded people.

I'm looking forward to talking to all of you!

[Sam Popowich]

I'm Sam Popowich, Discovery Systems Librarian at University of Alberta. I
do a lot of data munging and front-end world (primarily in Ruby and Rails).
I've been trying to promote programming/version control/bash for librarians
for a while, and things really seem to be heating up.

I and two other librarians from Edmonton attended SW Carpentry instructor
training with a view to offering programming bootcamps for librarians and
library staff in Alberta. There were around half a dozen librarians at SW
Carpentry last week, and we began to kick around the idea of modifying the
curriculum to be more relevant to the library world. The first step is to
tweak the existing curriculum to make the examples more library focused
(marc records instead of molecular data, etc). The bootcamps are aimed at
bringing people with little or no programming/shell experience up to an
"experienced novice" level. It would be great to start thinking about more
advanced training that we might offer to those who want it (Node.js, Rails,
Data Visualization level things). I'm hoping with this group we can start
to hack out a kind of infrastructure where this might be possible.

Sam.

[Danielle Robichaud]

Hi! 

I'm Danielle Robichaud and I work at the University of St. Michael's College John M. Kelly Library as a multi-hat wearing archivist. Officially I'm the Archives Assistant with Rare Books, Archival and Manuscript Collections, but I'm also the sometimes Digitization Project Co-ordinator with the Nouwen Archives and Research Collection (also at the Kelly Library). In the absence of any dedicated IT support or digital projects infrastructure a lot of my time is spent trying to figure out how to make the seemingly insurmountable happen with limited resources, tools and, often, knowledge. 

The Nouwen digitization project I'm involved with is using Collections U of T, an Islandora install, to disseminate material online. I've tackled how to get content onto the site, but I don't have any hands-on Drupal experience and have only limited experience with some of the coding elements required to configure and customize our multi-site instance. I also suspect that some of my content tackling could have been simplified by using some open source software and basic script writing, etc. 

In short, I want to expand my code/tech skills to expand my mental horizons and to make some of the digital projects I have in my head a (much easier) reality. 

[Mari Vihuri]

Hi everyone!

I'm Mari Vihuri (@marvellings), and I'm a part-time Master of Information student at the University of Toronto, but I spend much of my time working at Scholars Portal on a variety of projects including ACE, Ask a Librarian, and RefWorks Support. 

I'm here because I fell asleep the night before #TRY2014 thinking about some of the problems I'm trying to solve at work, and thinking about Startup Weekend Library Edition, Software Carpentry's bootcamp for librarians, code4lib, the awesome stuff happening over at UTSC's DSU, and wishing there was some kind of ongoing community of "librarians learning code" to help me build the tech skills I feel I'm missing. I've got a patchwork of self-taught web dev skills and have been forcing Drupal to do my bidding for several years now, but the more time I spend in libraryland, the more interesting problems I encounter where I know tech could help, but it's just a little bit out of my reach. I'm continuing to teach myself, but it takes time, and I still feel like I'm working in isolation sometimes. I know there are folks doing some awesome dev work in libraryland, but they've usually got way more experience so I still feel a bit intimidated or out of my element in those crowds.

So! I'm hoping we can establish a community of like-minded folks and see where we can take this idea. I'm especially interested in seeing what kinds of teaching/learning opportunities we can come up with here, as my fellow iSchool students often ask me where I learned what I know about tech, and worry that they know "nothing" about tech and wouldn't know where to start. These are incredibly smart, capable people, and I don't want the next generation of librarians to feel this way! What kinds of tech skills might be important for librarians? How can we demystify tech and get folks past that initial barrier? Can we identify some milestones in technical expertise that might be useful for various types of librarian activities and roles? How do we foster ongoing tech skills development from the early stages (e.g. a librarian's first HTML workshop or SW Carpentry bootcamp!) to something that becomes an integral part of a librarian's ongoing professional development?

I'm excited to see what we can make of this!

[Emily Porta]

Hey there, I'm Emily. 

HTML - CSS/SASS - JS - JQuery Wordpress (tiny bit of PHP), git (basics), responsive design and web design fundamentals.

I have my library degree from the iSchool and wanted to be a librarian, but that didn't work out so much. Somewhere somehow I ended up deciding to wander off into web development, and so now I'm doing that. I love the library world though, and want to stay active in it, but in a way that's relevant to my tech-hat-wearing self. I've run and/or assisted at a lot of tech/programming/professional development workshops in the past, and I was on the core organizing team of Startup Weekend: Library Edition. While I'm just what they call a "junior developer", and a lot of library stuff is uhhh not the stuff I do, I probably know someone who knows how to do what you want to do. Know the Software Carpentry people if you want to set up a meeting with them or whatever. I know a lot of python people. Python is sick for data and...well really a lot of stuff. And if you want to learn any front end stuff, let me know and I'd be happy to help any way I can.

Note: what I've learned from the past with putting on tech workshops for info pros and/or library students is that it is extremely difficult to find anyone outside of said library workers who have any idea what would be relevant to us, despite the best intentions. We're just too obscure. :p

TL;DR version: Emily. Web developer (front end) and librarian (all ends). Likes startup world, tech, info and digital lit. Likes to teach. eep...@gmail.com and @agentemily

[Sarah Simpkin]

Hi everyone! I'm Sarah Simpkin, GIS and Geography Librarian at the University of Ottawa. I love my job, but loathe (most) library software. I think we can do better, and I think feeling comfortable contributing to tech projects is one way we can make a real difference in peoples' day-to-days.

I attended the Software Carpentry bootcamp for librarians when it was at Pycon last month, and will be taking their instructor training course online this summer. As Sam mentioned upthread, I think the curriculum needs some tweaking to suit a library audience. I'd like to learn how to connect the various pieces available to us (parsing XML, managing/transforming metadata, improving interfaces, summarizing big datasets, etc.), and share those tips with others wondering about the same concepts. I think the Programming Historian project is a fabulous example of a practical series of tutorials contributed and reviewed by several people.

I'm also really glad this is happening online. It's really hard to get out to Toronto events sometimes!

[Thomas Guignard]

Hi there

I'm Thomas Guignard (@timtomch). I studied engineering (but don't ask me about the ring, there are no rings and associated decorum from where I come from, only nerds with dirty glasses playing Xbomb on Unix terminals) then did some research (theoretical acoustics, you don't want to know) before somehow walking into the library and ending up getting a job there. After six years as head of collection development (and surviving moving into this), I came to Toronto in late 2012. I then spent a year working with the Ontario Colleges and their eBook consortium. I'm currently work part time as a consultant for the Ontario Colleges Library Service (read: looking for a job) while I try to finish my MLIS via distance learning from Aberystwyth University (in Wales - yes I chose it partly because of its name).

Back in my engineering days, I mostly did C++, Matlab, Perl, LaTeX and random shell scripts. I've been dabbling in PHP/MySQL for ages, developing a few web applications for nonprofits. I also did some JavaScript (mostly Greasmonkey scripts) and -alas- VisualBasic and VBA to try to automate the workflows in the library. I've always tried teaching fellow librarians how they could automate their most tedious tasks, and so of course I'm thrilled with the current trend towards the democratization of programming, especially amongst librarians. I'm also into making, fiddling with CAD tools and Arduinos and stuff.

Out of curiosity, I attended the Software Carpentry bootcamp for librarians at PyCon this year and I absolutely loved the concept. I wasn't able to join the instructor training session that Sam went to, but I'd love to help developing the SW carpentry curriculum for librarians, lend a hand during a workshop or help someone with a specific issue. And learn new stuff in the process.

Yay!

[John Fink]

Hey folks,

I'm John Fink, presently the Digital Scholarship Librarian at McMaster University. I've been working in libraries since 1994, primarily as a systems administrator, and I have made several stabs at learning Real Programming (e.g. not bash script fartery) and have not really progressed anywhere except with Ruby, and that one not to my satisfaction.  I'm a great believer in library workers learning more about their technology stack so that they can take ownership of it, and coding is a part of that. I've been to the SW carpentry events and other similar things but they did not really gel with me; many tutorials basically go like http://www.forimpact.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/HowToDrawOwl.jpg . Could just be Python's fault though. :)

jf

On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 4:42 PM, Libraries Learning Code <libraries-l...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Who are you? Where do you work and what do you do? Why do you want to learn code or other tech skills?

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[Kaitlin Newson]

I'm Kaitlin Newson (@librarypixels), and I just finished my first year of the Master of Information program at the University of Toronto. I'm also a reference intern with AskOntario, and will be starting a position soon as an Info. Management Assistant with the Ontario Ministry of Finance. I've always been interested in tech, even before I knew I wanted to work in libraries.

In my undergrad, I worked closely with our digitization and systems librarian at my university (University of Prince Edward Island), and saw the value of coding skills in libraries firsthand, particularly in the work they were doing with the Islandora project. At that time, I took several courses in Computer Science, where I learned Java, SQL, and some web development skills. After doing these courses, I knew that I wanted a job that would allow me to work at the intersection of coding/tech and libraries.

Since then, I've been looking for ways to build on my existing skills, and to develop new ones, so that's what brings me here! I have also seen way too many of my fellow students that are afraid to learn coding skills, and hope that a group like this could be a welcoming environment for them to learn in.

[JR H]

Hey all!

I'm Jennie Rose Halperin (@little_wow, http://www.jennierosehalperin.me) and I am on the Community Building Team at Mozilla.  I got my MLS from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill this year, and I am excited about Open Culture, feminism, tech, and building community.

For me, learning code is a bit of an imperative...  I work in tech and have gotten this far without actually having strong tech skills (I can talk the talk, but not walk the walk, or code the code?), which I feel is a bit of a shame. A lot of my interest in this originally came from my desire to create autonomous communities where we're not defined or controlled by vendors or big data selling our interest and engaging with privacy and building a better web.
On a more personal level, the world is changing, and I didn't get any of this in my MLS.  We need to keep up and be the sea change that we seek to be as librarians and stewards of information!

[Dale Russell]

I'm Dale Russell and currently I am applying for jobs.  I finished my MLIS from Wayne State University this past fall. I am a former High School teacher, Community College Instructor, I have worked HR and Security for Disney in Florida (strangely all these jobs at the same time for a few years). During my degree I program I learned about how metadata was becoming paramount in helping users find objects/collections that were either made digital or born digital..in class I learned the basics of DC records, SGML and XML but only through my interests in digital curation/repos did my education focus on Islandora (Open Repositories Islandora Camp 2013 and NYC 2013 for the full camp) and of course MODS records, METS records, etc. So far most of my tech background is self taught (openstack, linux commands, BSD, configuring MySQL) I had a blacklight site up for a while on EC2 until a bot in China hammered it so I was paying 10 bucks a month on my "free instance"- so i took it down.

I have some skillsets, but when I tried doing some codeschool modules I could get the exercises to work but came away with "enter command- black magic happens, or syntax error happens". I attended startup weekend library edition which gave me some hope that I could use what I know, hit up the community for my weaknesses and try to build something useful for people.."project Eeyore that became _underscore...the initial idea was to build an app to make your consumer grade technology (ipad/nexus7) a "useful pot to put things in" a tool to assist with data collection, metadata creation that was easy to use and required little training to use so that librarians/archivists could work with populations to collect their history,data, etc and keep it local, findable and more importantly "own it" for the community. Then it pivoted to a data collection tool using ocr and if you watched the presentation you saw that mess.

I learned about the python boot camp in Montreal for Librarians and decided to attend after talking with Emily and her cohort in crime at the after party for startup weekend. I found that I walked away with way more understanding about programming and python from those 2 days than I did working over the summer on code modules from code academy/school. Then I attended the swc educator training- and came up with several tracts on the way home:

a. focus on building curriculum for YA/Teen librarians that have patrons wanting to do lego mindstorms/raspberry pi or arduino sessions -
b. non-techie librarians- that want to learn to be more useful in their organization or apply for different jobs
c.kind of techie librarians that want to develop a local maker lab, or encourage efforts within the community they serve
d. tech services librarians that want to learn skills like python to make data clean up easier etc..

my gmail is jdaler...@gmail.com, my twitter is jdalerussell (boston terrier icon image) my cell is 407-756-8823 if you want to reach me that way (Florida number). 

[Catherine McGoveran]

Hi folks!

 

I’m Catherine McGoveran (@kittmcg) – Government Information Librarian at uOttawa. I’m big into the open (including library) data side of things and am interested in obtaining / improving skills to work with this data for visualization, analysis, map creation, etc, etc. These are skills I’m interested in personally, but they're also being increasingly requested by our patrons and (as everyone here obviously knows) can help us have a big impact in our library and broader community.

 

I’ll also be participating in the online Software Carpentry instructor training course this summer, and am hoping we, as a group, can make some progress on supporting the fine-tuning of the Software Skills for Librarians curriculum. I’m so thrilled that this group exists and am happy to contribute in any way possible!

[Mita Williams]

Hello! I'm Mita Williams. Normally, I'm the User Experience Librarian at the Leddy Library at the University of Windsor, but I'm currently on sabbatical.

I would like to be more proficient with Python, JavaScript, and bash scripting. Locally, there's a small group of folks getting together to form a 'Software Guild' which is an admittedly silly name, but the intentions are great. There's a developer who wants to talk and teach about modern software practices such as pair programming. I'm looking forward to it because I think I would love pair programming.

Thanks for this!

On Tuesday, May 6, 2014 4:42:15 PM UTC-4, Libraries Learning Code wrote:

[Mark Matienzo]

On Tuesday, May 6, 2014 4:42:15 PM UTC-4, Libraries Learning Code wrote:

> Who are you? Where do you work and what do you do? Why do you want to learn code or other tech skills?

I am Mark Matienzo, the Director of Technology for a small startup non-profit called the Digital Public Library of America <http://dp.la>. I've worked as a librarian, archivist, and developer, and I am now an administrator who has to get my hands dirty on occasion to write, debug, and deploy stuff.

My interest in this group is figuring out what actionable curricula for librarians would look like, and to make hackathons easier for librarians who don't see themselves as "coders" to participate in. I'm particularly interested in exploring curriculum development around the processing and manipulation of metadata, because that is a big part of what my organization does. I'm working with some folks to organize a metadata hackathon some time this summer that will hopefully have a beginner track.

Part of this for me is also seeing what sort of role my organization could provide to help promote or provide these activities. I've had some exploratory conversations with folks like Jennie about this too.

Mark

[Greg Wilson]

I am Greg Wilson, the project lead for Software Carpentry
(http://software-carpentry.org), a volunteer organization that teaches
basic computing skills to scientists and engineers. We've run a couple
of two-day workshops for librarians this year, and would like to run
more. My goal is to find out what we ought to teach - I'm pretty sure
that some of our current curriculum (http://software-carpentry.org/v5/)
is useful, but other parts aren't, and that there are things we're *not*
teaching that would be.
Thanks,
Greg

--
Greg Wilson
Software Carpentry http://www.software-carpentry.org/
Mozilla Science Lab http://mozillascience.org/
@swcarpentry | @swcannounces | @mozillascience

[Andromeda Yelton]

I'm Andromeda Yelton, a freelance librarian/software developer in greater Boston.  I do Python/Django development, write and speak on library technology issues, and teach librarians how to code.  I'm also on the Board of Directors of the Library & Information Technology Association and the advisory board of the Ada Initiative.

My game goal is increasing the coding skills of libraryland, so I'm interested in working with anyone who shares that goal, and especially anyone who can lend scale to such efforts.  I have Opinions on what curricula should contain, and how existing freely available code-learning resources do and don't work for librarians. Construing libraryland broadly and inclusively in this effort matters to me, too.

Andromeda Yelton

Library & Information Technology Association Board of Directors: http://www.lita.org

Ada Initiative advisory board: http://adainitiative.org

http://andromedayelton.com

@ThatAndromeda

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[Leah Strudwick]

I recently completed my first year in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto.  I work at a small corporate health science library, mostly doing document retrieval and delivery, and helping to coordinate the logistics of an upcoming move.  I have no tech skills to speak of but suspect that they are crucial for librarians in general, and special librarians working with small collections/local systems in particular.  I'm basically the poster child for Mari's description of a library student who knows nothing about tech and is really at a loss for where to begin.  So that's what brought me here.

[Rosalyn Metz]

My name is Rosalyn Metz and I work at Stanford University as the Operations Manager for the digital repository. I've done development in the past but that was quite some time ago and things have changed quite a bit. Now I write little scripts to make my life easier (think: query/get data out of solr, make simple RESTful calls to an API, etc.).

My development skills are rusty to say the least and most of it is self taught. I can see the gaps in my knowledge but I don't have the time to learn it on my own. Honestly sometimes I wish I could just start from the beginning and pretend I know nothing.

Oh and an aside! Once again the Canadian librarians have me in awe. Y'all come up with the best ideas.

[ni...@satifice.com]

Hey,

I'm nina, I'm a PT digital projects librarian at York University in Toronto. I've been trying to teach myself to code for a few years now and it is going okay-ish. At the moment, I'm mainly trying to focus on Javascript for a few different reasons (mainly front end web stuff that I do), but also learning how to make little bash scripts to make my life easier.

Sincerely,

nina

On Tuesday, May 6, 2014 4:42:15 PM UTC-4, Libraries Learning Code wrote:

[Bess Sadler]

On Tuesday, May 6, 2014 1:42:15 PM UTC-7, Libraries Learning Code wrote:
> Who are you? Where do you work and what do you do? Why do you want to learn code or other tech skills?

Hi, my name is Bess Sadler (@eosadler on twitter). I manage teams of software developers for the Stanford digital library group, and I'm interested in curriculum development. We use the Hydra digital library stack (http://projecthydra.org), which relies heavily on MODS records. We, and many other institutions, have huge needs around manipulating MODS records, and I want to create a curriculum that would let people learn basic software development skills in the context of metadata cleanup and manipulation.

I heard about this group from Becky Yoose, who is also one of the people I've been talking to about the idea of something called MODSBridge. The idea is to follow the pattern of the RailsBridge curriculum (http://railsbridge.org) but instead of learning to be a Rails / web developer, someone could learn to clean up / build / augment MODS records.

I envision this as an open, collaboratively maintained curriculum, built around test driven development practices and that over time would help us build out the MODS gem (https://rubygems.org/gems/mods). I'd like the curriculum to be something we could teach at, say, the DPLA Metadata-a-thon, or at code4lib pre-conferences, various conferences, etc, as well as something we could use at work when we had someone new to train up on MODS manipulation.

Currently, I'm trying to get official work time to spend on this project.

[Coral Sheldon-Hess]

Hi!

I'm Coral Sheldon-Hess (@web_kunoichi on Twitter). Currently, I'm a Web Services Librarian at the University of Alaska Anchorage. I get to do a little bit of development in this position, but not nearly as much as I'd like--I'm more of a UX evangelist/project manager/policy writer/content editor/systems configure-er(?) than a developer, right now. Now and then I get to play with JavaScript, PHP, and CSS at work. In my free time I write things in Python (although I have a CoffeeScript project bubbling its way to the surface, too).

So I'm interested in learning to code from that side -- I'm a fairly competent coder, although my skills feel rusty; so I am trying to figure out how best to improve those skills and how to move from a front-end sometimes-developer position into a back-end (or full-stack) full-time developer position. 

But I'm also interested from the other side: I run a women's programming workshop in Anchorage, so I'm always looking at how best to teach technology concepts. We did our first "programming" class last month (SQL), and we're doing another in August (Ruby). We've also had classes on the Command Line Interface, HTML, CSS, Web Fundamentals, and GitHub.

I am especially interested in what language I should be using on flyers and social media posts, to get our intended audience (beginners! preferably beginners who can use a browser and email, but we'll take any skill level) to feel confident enough to come to our classes. 

Anyway, nice to meet you all! I look forward to these discussions! (And thanks to Becky Yoose for the heads up about this group!)

-- 

Coral

[Michel Castagné]

Howdy, I'm Michel, the Web Initiatives Librarian at the University of Ottawa. I manage the main library website and some of the assorted web apps. I work with the entire stack, but I'm still fairly fresh out of library school and have a lot to learn. These days I've been trying to wrap my head around some of the new-ish Javascript frameworks (Angular? React?) and NoSQL databases, and while I've picked up bits and pieces of tech knowledge over the years in an unstructured way, I'd really love to participate in a more holistic learning project like this.

[sylvain machefert]

Time to leave North America :) I'm Sylvain Machefert (@symac) from France, currently working in "Bordeaux Montaigne University" as a system librarian (although this term doesn't really exist there).

Like @timtomch I studied engineering and played a lot XBomb on unix terminals :) My final year intership led me to a company working with libraries and I "fell in love" with this field. Since then, I've been the computer guy in libraries, trying to develop computing skills to improve efficiency with automation. I've learnt "serious" languages like C++, Java and so on, but today, I mainly work on the web, developing in PHP/JS, write scripts to manage datas using perl (while I'm currently learning Python, for collaborative projects I'm working on and which have chosen this language). Btw, for Python, I've completed the codecademy.com program and I found it a good way to learn the basis of a new language.

I've many questions regarding libraries and code : should librarians learn to code, should coders learn library science ? Both ? I'm still wondering ...

p.s. : sorry for my english, disadvantage of welcoming french ppl ;)

[Chris Sharp]

I'm Chris Sharp, PINES System Administrator at the Georgia Public Library Service.  I administer the Evergreen ILS cluster that supports the PINES public library consortium and I'm very involved with the Evergreen open source software project.  I have skills in Linux, bash, Perl, and some Python.  I'm looking to develop my proficiency in Perl, Python, and JavaScript so that I can better contribute to Evergreen and to other free and open source software projects.

[devin higgins]

Hi everyone,

I'm Devin Higgins, Digital Library Programmer at Michigan State University. I work on a variety of programming projects, mostly around the idea of improving or "enhancing" metadata to build better online collections. I'm wrapped up in the JavaScript library D3 lately, particularly for drawing networks. My preferred language is Python (and Django for web), but I've getting more comfortable with PHP lately, too.

I'm looking forward to hearing more about interesting projects from around the library world, and learning about how programming is being situated in libraries. Open to collaboration!

-Devin

[Mark Laufersweiler]

I am Mark Laufersweiler. Educated as a meteorologist (PhD), worked as a systems admin in several meteorology departments(FSU, OU) and now am working for the University of Oklahoma Libraries as their Research Data Specialist. I am helping the library understand research data, working on setting up a repository and trying to understand and document research workflows as it relates to the data life cycle. I am more of a swiss army knife as it relates to data, data analytics and visualization and data management, I do a lot of little things but am not really an expert in any one thing.  

Our Open Access repository, SHAREOK is our journal repo. I will be working on setting up a repository for data as well. We are starting the process of offering short courses in LaTex, data management, research programing and best practices. Several of the library staff are getting trained as Software Carpentry instructors in preparation. 

[Becky Yoose]

A very belated hello! Short introduction follows, before I forget to do so for another month or so...

Who are you? Where do you work and what do you do?

Becky Yoose, Discovery and Integrated Systems Librarian at Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa. If it involves electricity, I'm involved in running it. Much of my work centers around our integrated library system Sierra, our digital repository suite of systems including Islandora, OJS, OCS, and soon Omeka, proxy servers, ILLiad, Coral Resources, and other various back room library technologies. Since we are a small staff I also have reference, instruction, and liaison duties.

In reality, though, I deal with meetings. And printers. I hate printers. And meetings.

Depending on the crop rotation, I am either in the middle of a corn field, a soybean field, an alfalfa field, a hay field, or a fallow field.

Why do you want to learn code or other tech skills?

Because I can. :cP

Most of what I learned technology-wise has been self-taught, and this is another venue where this can continue, as well as a chance for helping others on their learning paths. I've been part of LibCatCode, CatCode, ALCTS/LITA Code Year IG, and have been hanging around code4lib for a while now, so maybe, just maybe I have some informal institutional memory that might be of use here.

Now to change my settings so I can receive an email digest from the group...

Cheers,
Becky

------------------------------
Becky Yoose
Discovery and Integrated Systems Librarian

[Michael Paulmeno]

My name is Michael Paulmeno. Currently I am an Electronic Services Librarian at Delta State University, located in Cleveland, MS about 2 hours south of Memphis. My job includes many things such as web development, PC troubleshooting, maintaining our ILS and the server it sits on, working through access issues for our databases and Ebsco products (EDS, A to Z, etc), and anything else which comes up. Coding is the one thing I rarely do outside of some dabbling in JavaScript.

I worked through about half of the tracks on Code Academy and have subscribed to Treehouse. That taught me enough to know this is something I like doing, but its just not the same by yourself. Coding allows me to be creative while also bolstering an important skill set. Thus I've come here to interact with other like minded people and build up my repertoire of coding skills.

[buch...@reed.edu]

Hey all, 

I'm Laura Buchholz, and am the Digital Assets Specialist at Reed College, where I work with different folks to get things into our digital library. We're also building our very own replacement for content dm, and it is becoming obvious that having knowledge of the back end of digital library systems would be valuable. But my main reason for trying to teach myself to code is that it is very frustrating to know that there are better/less labor intensive ways of doing the work that I do, but that I don't know how to make it happen. I'm working through some courses in my spare time, but miss having a professor or classmates to talk with and check assumptions with. Which is what brought me here!

[Danielle Raymond]

Hi everyone,

I am a library tech student at Langara College. I'm studying online and live in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. While my interest in coding has not manifested in my work yet, as a volunteer, I have initiated a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon in my home city. We've had two editions so far and are contemplating a third. I'm theoretically interested in open-source software and am keen to know more.

Best-
Danielle