Notes for a keynote I gave at the Chartered Institute for Library and Information Professionals Cataloguing and Indexing Group biennial conference, University of Swansea, 31 August - 2 September 2016
The following text represents my notes rather than precisely what was said on the day and should be taken in that spirit.
Librarians play a crucial role in cultivating world-class research and in most disciplinary areas today world-class research relies on the use of software. Established non-profit organisations such as Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry offer introductory research software skills training - that is, on coding and data manipulation that go beyond the use of familiar office suites - with a focus on the needs and requirements of research scientists. Library Carpentry is a comparable introductory software skills training programme with a focus on the needs and requirements of library and information professionals. In November 2015 its initial exploratory run, held in London, attracted 59 participants from 14 institutions. Since then 11 Library Carpentry workshops have been organised in 5 countries across 4 continents. This talk will discuss what we did, why did it, where we are going, and how you can get involved in our future.
It is an honour to have been asked to speak at this CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group biennial conference. Not least, because it is lovely to be among librarians, and metadata librarians at that. I've worked in libraries on and off for most of the present decade, and indeed in my first role after by PhD was in a library, at the University of Kent working for Robin, where I was responsible for metadata, for cleaning and maintaining the academic publication metadata in Kent's Institutional Repository. That role more than any other got me interested in computational approaches to data in historical research: realising as I did that the data normalisation challenges I faced as a maintainer of metadata where individuals inexplicably used three different variants of their own name, were likely to be replication as a consumer of metadata. After a few years of intellectually peripatetic post-doctoral labour, much to my surprise I got a job at the British Library as a Curator in the Digital Research Team. One of my responsibilities there was a manage the library's internal Digital Scholarship Training Programme and to deliver training sessions where my hodgepodge of accumulated skills fitted with need. Last September I left the library for my current role at the University of Sussex, I hasten to add never with a sense that I'd gone back to where I'm supposed to be, rather with a keenness to add more variety to an increasingly hybrid and multi-faceted career--if you're struggling to parse why someone with my job role is giving this talk consider that I'll be teaching Art History in a few weeks. I was keen upon moving from library to lecturing to keep my connection with 'digital' library skills training going, not least because I throughly enjoy passing on what I know (and finding out what I don't know that other people would find useful).
Thankfully, or tactically depending on how you look at it, I had a commitment that would keep my connection with libraries going. Since early-2015 I had been planning Library Carpentry, nothing to do with woodwork were you still wondering, but rather a software skills training programme aimed at the needs and requirements of Library professionals. The 'software skills' in question were not of the dull turn-of-the-century ITC variety, on making a powerpoint or doing your accounts in Excel, but rather coding and data manipulation that go beyond the use of familiar office suites, that go back to the little flashing command prompts I and many others of my generation grew up playing with on their Acorn Electrons and BBC Micros, tools whose control over computation fascinated me before the aforementioned dull turn-of-the-century ITC training drummed all that curiosity out of me (I'm told, pleasingly, that thanks to the efforts of things like the Raspberry Pi Foundation, the situation in schools is much better these days).
SLIDE So in November 2015, I co-ordinated the exploratory run of Library Carpentry. It took the form of four three-hour sessions held at the City University London Centre for Information Science across four successive Monday evenings. These sessions attracted 59 participants from 14 institutions in London and its environs, and they caused 'Librarian Fireworks' (see blogs on slide for more). The lessons covered five main topics. SLIDE In the first week we looked at some basics of computing--namely, the computer is stupid, everyone borrows code, I'm not some kind of wizard but someone who makes it up as they go along, everyone has imposter syndrome (and if they don't, watch out for them)--and regular expression syntax: sequences of characters that help you match patterns in text. SLIDE In the second week we looked at the unix shell--that flashing command prompt--as a place where you can easily manipulate, combine, and mine both tabular and textual data. SLIDE In the third week we looked at Git and GitHub, respectively a tool that allows you to version control data and code (that is, keep a history of all the changes to it ever and roll them back if needed) and a web-based service that allows us to collaborate on versioning and publishing that version controlled data and code. SLIDE In the fourth week we looked at OpenRefine, a tool that allows you to batch edit and normalise tabulated data: so all those author name variants fixed by setting some similarity matching software going and clicking a button. SLIDE All the lessons were team developed and team taught, and were published via GitHub under a Creative Commons BY licence. SLIDE The work was funded by the Software Sustainability Institute: an Institute of which I am a fellow, which cultivates world-class research with software, and is based at the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester, Southampton and Oxford. For more about the SSI and for details of how to become a fellow in their annual Fellowship round, see software.ac.uk (basically, you get money to run events on software sustainability, broadly conceived).
SLIDE The involvement of the Software Sustainability Institute hints at a deeper 'why' for me creating Library Carpentry. Librarians play a crucial role in cultivating world-class research and in most disciplinary areas today world-class research relies on the use of software. Established non-profit volunteer organisations such as Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry offer introductory research software skills training with a focus on the needs and requirements of research scientists. Nothing comparable existed for library and information professionals. As librarians have substantial expertise working with data, I argue that adding software skills to your armoury is an effective and important use of professional development resource that benefits both the library and information science profession and your colleagues and collaborators in the humanities. Librarians are, after all, important partners in the Digital History work that I do and am trying to foster through work--for example--convening the Institute of History Research Digital History seminar or writing lessons for The Programming Historian, an online open access suite of learning resources aimed at historians. Librarians like you are experts with the data and at the data management our projects require. Some of you bridge administration and research domains in ways that underscore the value of "alt-ac" (alternative academic) roles in Higher Education, positions the Digital Humanities strongly supports. And the choices you and your colleagues make of providers and services can help underscore the open, critical, and data-rich perspective on web-based resources that digital humanists advocate. I'd argue, however, that these partnerships are threatened by the software skills gap widening between your community of expertise and researchers applying computational approaches to arts and humanities.
SLIDE In 2007, Jonathan Rochkind argued in his Editorial Introduction to the inaugural issue of The Code4Lib Journal that:
This is a decisive time for libraries. In the changing social and technological environment, libraries must adapt to fulfill their missions and satisfy their users. Library technology is acutely involved in this adaptation. Digital services, content and tools have become a part of nearly every aspect of library operations. The "digital library" is here–if you work in a library, you probably work in a digital library.
While the "digital library" has since 2007 fundamentally altered what research libraries do and are for, the integration of software skills into the work of library and information professionals has remained uneven. SLIDE As Andromeda Yelton notes in her 2015 American Library Association Library Technology Report 'Coding for Librarians: Learning by Example', significant social and political barriers remain:
Many library coders spend a significant amount of time trying to cultivate buy-in, educate their colleagues about technology, or work against siloed organizational structures as they produce inherently cross-departmental work [22]
Thoroughly aware as I am that a) librarianship covers a super diverse range of roles and b) that within national jurisdictions, cultures, and mores the diversity of that range can differ drastically, Library Carpentry sought to address this skills gap, to intervene at the disjuncture between librarians crucial role in world-class research and the reliance on software of that world-class research (a reliance that is, of course, deeper outside the disciplines I know best, but growing in History, Art History, English, and Cultural Studies nevertheless).
SLIDE Coming 10 months after that initial run, now is a good time to reflect on what has been achieved. Since November 11 Library Carpentry workshops have been organised in 5 countries across 4 continents: in Australia, Canada, Norway, South Africa and the USA. These workshops have reached over 200 librarians and none were formally managed or approved, individuals just took the materials and built on them. SLIDE James Cook University, Townsville, Australia SLIDE University of Queensland Library SLIDE University of California San Diego Library SLIDE National Library of Norway SLIDE The lesson materials themselves have been comprehensively improved. During the Mozilla Science Lab Global Spring that took place 2-3 June, a team from the USA, Australia, Canada, UK, the Netherlands, and South Africa developed lesson materials, added a new lesson on SQL (a relational database management language), assigned administrative roles required to support future development, and republished the materials using a new lesson template. SLIDE Library Carpentry now has a distributed management and maintenance structure: indeed other people taken over with the day-to-day coordination of lessons such that I'm now relishing having lost control, seeing others impose their vision on its future, and getting on with promoting their great work: here an especially big thanks must go to Belinda Weaver for leading the Library Carpentry Mozilla Sprint and making massive progress in Australia. SLIDE One of the things the team did is ensure that alongside supporting the running of in person workshops, that the lessons are also published online in ways that mean you can both build on them for your own training offers and use them for individual or peer-to-peer learning in your own time. These published lessons are version controlled using GitHub Pages, making Library Carpentry open and transparant. And updates, issues, and suggestions are handled via GitHub issue trackers and a vibrant Gitter discussion forum, again venues open for all to see. Here is where you can get involved and improve Library Carpentry: by taking on and asking questions about a lesson when you don't get something, by adding new tasks that better fit real world examples in your professional life, by asking if anyone is willing and able to run a workshop at your library after which you commit to passing on some of what you've learnt (there is, after all, no better way to learn something than to teach it, another reason I love to run so much training).
Everyone who decides to pick up some software skills does so for their own reasons. I hesitate to offer any, knowing as I do that I am at a distance removed from your professional concerns, cants, and cultures. SLIDE Nevertheless, in the blurb for this conference, it reads:
librarians are acquiring new skills in metadata creation and manipulation; and, in this ever changing environment, vendors of library management and discovery systems are under pressure to evolve their offer
By way of conclusion, this alone suggests to me a number of potential reasons for acquiring some software skills:
- SLIDE Would learning Git, a software tool technologists commonly use to manage projects, enable you to work better with university systems admins and developers whose labour supports the presentation and reuse of your metadata?
- SLIDE Would learning some simple shell commands for manipulating and mining data, and the control and power over data a little more investment of time on top would give you, make you better able to critique--and in time call bullshit on--service providers offering shiny new products?
- SLIDE And would learning OpenRefine, a tool with which you can normalise all those pesky variants in datasets and leave traces of your decision making as metadata, provide you with the skill-set to collaborate with researchers reusing your metadata in uncritical and problematic ways?
SLIDE I don't know if any of these reasons for acquiring software skills chime with you. But I hope during the course hearing about Library Carpentry you've acquired your own.
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