librarypunk - 074 - The Carpentries feat. Dorothea Salo

Episode Date: December 2, 2022

Returning guest Dorothea Salo joins us to teach Justin about The Carpentries.  Media Referenced https://carpentries.org/ https://librarycarpentry.org/ https://datacarpentry.org/ https://twitter.com/thecarpentries https://automatetheboringstuff.com/

That is one gay ass skeleton. Hey girl. I'm Justin. I'm a Skalkan. I'm a Skull Com library. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library, and my pronouns are they them. I'm Jay. I'm a music library director. And my pronouns are he, him. And we have a guest. Would you like to introduce yourself? I sure would. My name is Dorothea Sallow. My pronouns are she, her.

And I teach in the information school at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Welcome back Glad to be here Third time's a charm That's right Who's cat Dorothy is that your cat? It's probably my cat

Yes His name is Lancelot His pronouns are he him And he's being a jerk Arthur Arthur Arthur there's a Lance A lot

I just need a guest With a Gwynnevere Yeah Arthur do you want to make A best friend No Arthur come up here No

He's just like sitting on the rug right by the couch. Yeah, Lancelott's issue. Oh, big stretch. Is that if I'm not sitting in exactly the correct way in the chair, he doesn't get to sit where he wants to sit. And this is clearly a problem.

Both my cat and my dog are like that. That's why I was getting yelled at. Nice. So, Dorothea, we brought you on because I'm interested in the carpentries, which I knew as the library carpentries. But I think I don't understand them. So that's why I brought you guys. The more I try and understand it, I'm more confused.

So there's like three of them, but there's, they're all the carpentries, whatever. But first, we have an Ask Reddit. Those people are dumb-dums. So, yeah, you tell them, Lance a lot. That's right. Okay. I think this one's a relatable one. And since we have I school faculty here, that'll be helpful.

How to gain experience developing and implementing library programming. I have a bit of a question that could be summed up using the phrase, What Comes First, Chicken or the Egg? The Egg, eggs evolved for poor chickens. I graduated with my MLS about 10 years ago, and after struggling to find a professional position during the recession, I went to IT. Now I want to get back into the game. However, I have seen public library programming experience as a qualification.

My question is, how do you develop programs when you are not? not working in a public library setting. Hence, what comes first, chicken or the egg. Again, the egg. I don't know why you're still asking this. Right now, I am volunteering at my public library doing program support. I basically show up right before the event and serve as a librarian's assistant. I also volunteer at a not-for-profit bookstore.

Am I on the right track or do you need to expand my search? So I am not a public librarian. So I don't know how helpful my advice would be on programming. But I actually have never really seen programming. I mean, you can see anything in a job at these days, I guess, that doesn't need to be there. But programming is qualification. How do you do it? Sounds to me like they're on the right track.

Yeah, like, because what I would say is that, one, apply to jobs even if you aren't qualified for them. Just shoot your shot. Always. Yeah. Two, I mean, I'm a music library director and I don't have a degree of music. so like live your dreams kids but like with like programming if it specifies library programming what you might do is like so my previous position I did like discovery like you know layer work and stuff and I had never done that before but what I did when they like asked me questions about it

or I had to talk about it in the interview process I said I don't have experience maintaining or managing this, but I do have experience using this both as a patron and as someone teaching it to patrons. And so I do know how it works on the front end, and therefore, when I would do work on the back end, like, I would have that in mind. So think about how you can spin your inexperience to sound good. That was like a colleague had like given me that tip. She was like, say this. And I was like, oh, it's genius. So see like all of this other experience you're getting. Or like say like you've gone to library programs before as just like a person attending them.

What do you like add that in there? Like what did you think about them? Like what might you do for that program differently or something? That would be my advice. Yeah. Well, for one, you should be taught like ask the librarian you're working with at these programs that you're volunteering for. Like, that seems pretty smart to me. Just, hey, how did you get this idea? What led up to this idea? Resources did you need for this idea? You know, all of that stuff. But also, like,

if you spent 10 years in IT, also just spend the experience you do have. Like, if you had to, you have experience in IT. So, like, come up with an idea about doing, I don't know, like a tech help lab. How would you go about doing that? You could do. design a program like that and I don't know, ask the librarian that you support if that seems like something that they've, the planning portion of it seems like if that's the same. I don't know. There are a lot of ways to spend experience and inexperience. What I might do strategically or what I would advise one of my students to do if they were looking at a job interview that included, you know, you're going to be doing programming. Definitely.

scope out the library's calendar, find out what kinds of programming they already do. And then there's an entire LIS literature on things like book talks and story times and reading circles and craft circles and just whatever events of event, whatever kinds of event that particular library seems to favor, you can find out how to do it. And you can also come prepared to the interview with, okay, I know you've been doing a lot of book talks. I know you've been doing a lot of, you know, whatever they've been doing a lot of. I'd actually be interested in changing it up and then, you know, propose a program that fits with who you are and what you can already do. Yeah, you can definitely do programming for computer stuff because they always need someone to teach basic computer skills.

Oh, yeah. Yep. And probably like a lot, maybe, like, most librarians might have like computer experience, but if you have like experience and it, you probably have more of that kind of, knowledge and experience than a lot of the other librarians who would be applying to this position and if that is a type of programming that is highly desired that maybe other librarians might not have like they might have some skills but not to the degree that you would where you might even be able to offer more advanced stuff or answer questions more deeply than other people yeah yeah okay good luck good luck kid yeah get up there okay alternate name for december display hello all looking for an alternate name for my December display. My supervisor and I came up with a book,

Advent calendar type of thing where every day is a different celebration using National Today website. I was informed today that Advent calendars are intensely Christian and to try and avoid using the word Advent in our display title, any ideas. Is it the word Advent that they're trying to count down calendar? A winter holiday a day. Countdown calendar. Yeah. Sure. Alliteration. Wait, is that alliteration? Yes.

Countdown calendar. Yeah. Countdown calendar. I like it. Yeah. Countdown to what? That's up to you. Countdown to 2023.

Yeah. Live your dreams. Yeah. And also you could just do a book a day kind of stuff. But yeah, I feel like this kind of thing like annoys me with when you take like a Christian thing. You're just like, no, it's a generic thing. It's like, just call it a Christmas party. not, it's always during Christmas.

It's called an advent calendar. It's fine. This is a pet peeve of mine. That's why I don't like the whole common era before common era. It's still a Christian calendar, though. Just say what it is. It's fine. Whatever.

This impulse gets me annoyed, so that's why I put it in there. But yeah, just called a countdown calendar or something. I don't know. Consider not having a title to your display at all. I mean. Just do it. I used to do that all of the time, especially for like winter stuff.

They were mad popular displays. I couldn't keep stuff on it. So it was literally like anything even hinting at snow or a winter holiday or anything like that. It was like it goes on the display because there's no theme here because it goes out too fast. So, you know. The things on the table we are highlighting. Yeah. Put the calendar of the days that you have.

Just slap that up there so they can, they can figure it out themselves. Don't title shit. National Day We're going to turn into beat poets about this. Well, I was going to say, instead of the witch, now you can have, like, the Grinch. The Grinch. Yeah.

He stole Christmas and Advent, I guess. He stole him, so you can't call it that. I've been saving the picture of the Grinch with, like, a huge ass. I've been saving that for, like, three months to post, and I finally felt it was close enough. Good. Yeah. What is it, the grissy?

Yeah, it's, good. Yeah. People really want to fuck the Grinch. I don't understand this impulse, but... I support them. I do not share in this desire, but I support their journey in fulfilling it. Likewise, uninterested, but you do you. Or the Grinch, whichever. Today's National Espresso Day, if anyone was interested. Okay. I've been hanging on this one. How many languages are offered on your library computers? We had a patron complain that we didn't offer Russian as a keyboard language option. Maybe wonder how many languages do other library computer offer?

Similar, not exact, but I guess related. So my institution, it's just graduate students, and the majority of them are actually international students. We have a lot of the bulk of our students are international students. And they have to have a certain degree, I forget which of the whatever levels, of like English proficiency to be accepted. And then we do offer like remedial, like, not remedial, but like we do offer like English classes, especially for like slang or like alliteration and stuff, especially for like the composers and the singers and stuff like in addition to the regular diction.

Because it's, I'm at a conservatory. And I had asked like in like a staff meeting, I was like, would it maybe be like a good idea for me to put bilingual signs for things in the library? in English and Mandarin. And apparently this was a discourse that it happened before I got there. Because, like, I, like, I actually work in an institution that tends to walk the walk and talk the talk that it's doing. I've, like, actually been legitimately impressed with it.

And so I was, like, kind of surprised there wasn't bilingual stuff. And they're like, well, we tried that. And then students kept getting angry if specifically. language wasn't on there. And so eventually you just be like, when do you cut off the, like, which languages do you put on there? And so eventually they just had to reach the decision of like, because you're always going to be excluding one. Like, you're always going to be excluding them. And so they made the decision of this is an English language school and you have to be able to speak a certain level of English to attend it. Therefore, our signs are just going to be in English.

Now, granted, I'm not at a public library. But when they said, like, we tried that and then more people were just like, well, why isn't this language on there? Why isn't this language on there? Why isn't this language on there? And on and on and on to where it's like, which ones do you pick? So, because it's like how often are you updating your signs? But so I imagine it might be easier on a computer, but I don't know how you do like that with the operating system. Sadie probably knows, but semi-related. But this is the Christmas thing all over again. Yeah. It's just though we have a, we're just defaulting to this since what we're doing.

Yeah, I'm, I, that was, that came up at my last job to, because we would always try and have bilingual dictionaries, but I could never get them to put up the money to get a Haitian, Creole English academic dictionary. There's only one. And so I was like, we need to order this one. And they're like, no. And I was like, okay, but that's like most of our students, first language. And it's, we need an academic dictionary because they don't know the word in English and can't look it up in a traveler's dictionary. I mean, that makes. sense to have. Yeah. Like, yeah. Well, and I've thought about this a lot, actually, just at both of like my current job and my previous job, even though it doesn't fall under my umbrella and my current job anymore, but specifically because I live in an area that has indigenous languages. And I know at least in some of the places they're taught at public schools.

So it would depend on the side. the setup of the public computers. So, like, I was thinking about it at my current job and realized it was kind of a non-issue because patrons can install whatever they want on our computers. So they have permissions to do that. So maybe you don't need to do it for them. You can just give them instructions on how to download the keyboard or add the keyboard themselves.

Oh, so you don't have to redo the entire OS? Not normally, no. You can usually just go. in and add a language and it'll it'll download it. It would vary depending on programs. So like things like office, if you're like really office heavy users, that might get a little trickier because you have to like install language packs and stuff. But ultimately, that's what our students do a lot. Yeah. Yeah. I would think that that would be kind of a, an IT question plus just like a demographic question. Like you have, you know, Hait

Creole speakers or Spanish speakers or Vietnamese speakers or, you know, Salish language speakers. So like, you know, it would vary, I guess. Yeah, there's also like the alt commands that most people use because I like to, whenever I'm typing in Spanish, I like to use the U.S. international keyboard, which is the way I initially learned how to do it. But when I take Spanish for staff and faculty, he always advises us how to do like a three. It's like an alt pressing. So you use the regular U.S. English keyboard, but it's alt, whatever keys, alt tab, whatever,

in order to get the accent or the character you want. So, yeah, I think it's pretty easy to set up on this. But like having a separate keyboard isn't usually necessary. It depends on the language, I guess. That was Ask Reddit. Those people are dumb-dums. Actually, we didn't have any real dumb questions. That felt kind of rude.

Anyway, those are good questions. Most of the time, it's like, can we ban children from public libraries? Or like mentally ill and or homeless people are creepy. Can we get them out? That has been a theme as well. Or just people being cops. God forbid you be a male in the kids section. Yeah.

Yeah. So I'm interested in the carpentries because I had a faculty member reach out to me about Tops. And he wasn't coming on to me. It is teaching open science initiative by NASA. So they're trying to teach people how to do very basic open science stuff. And because it's NASA, they're giving you a shit ton of money to teach stuff that I, like a chump, was teaching for free. It is very much like set up an Orchid account. out. The end. Right, to readme.com. Give me $400,000. So, yeah, so I was looking into it. And because it's new grant, there was not a lot of great documentation. It was very confusing. And there was, like, some confusing language around certification.

But somehow I found a link. I couldn't find it again. But it just linked to the instructors for the carpentries. And I was like, well, maybe one of us needs to learn how to, like, one of us needs to be a certified instructor. And I don't know how to do that. So I just started reaching around to have the carpentries explained to me because it's one of those library adjacent organizations where I just get confused and I just go, which one was this? Is this the one that teaches privacy?

No, that's Library Freedom Project. Is this the one that teaches an e-book essay? So I can't keep it all straight, even though it's always coming at me all the time. But, Dorothea, you teach carpentry. So how'd you get into it? I do. How did I get into Carpentries? That's actually a good question, and I don't remember to tell you the honest truth.

But I did become what they call a certified instructor a few years back. I think I ran into them because students will come to me and ask, where can I learn R? Where can I learn Python? You know, I'm interested in becoming a data librarian. and how do I learn the skills? And so Carpetries was a thing by then. Carpentries actually started in the mid-90s with someone named Greg Wilson,

who was at Los Alamos, I think, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. And Greg's issue was that he was having trouble with scientists coming to computer scientists. and just, you know, wanting to write software and not having the least slightest clue where to begin, never having seen a command line. Git was not really a thing in the mid-90s, but version control was, and they didn't know anything about version control. Just, you know, really basic, what's that function? Not knowing anything and wanting to push everything off on their grad students or push everything off on computer.

scientists who were supposed to be running like supercomputer clusters and didn't really have time to write bash scripts for people. So Greg felt, and I think correctly, that there was a need, right? There was a need for a training program for this, not even for coding as much, but for coding prerequisites. Here are the things you have to understand before you start to code. And that actually was the genesis of the first carpentry, which was software carpentry. And And then data science came along, so not too long thereafter, there was data carpentry. And data librarians were actually heavily involved in the construction of data carpentry because we teach things like Excel is powerful, but extremely dangerous.

We teach things like Open Refine, which is the greatest tool in the universe. It's my favorite thing ever. I wish it had existed when I was a baby Brerian. It did not. But it does now. And it's great. Learn it. If you do anything metadata-ish or, you know, spreadsheet-ish, it's wonderful. And library carpentry actually kind of was its own thing for a long time. You know, we're librarians. We're very, very insular. We do our own thing. But we, but by then, both

software and data carpentry had their kind of, had their operations locked down, had their Creative Commons licensing lockdown, had a lot of very good lesson templates. And those are all Creative Commons as well. So it was relatively easy to seize on something that was working and adapt it to the library environment. Eventually having three separate organizations got to be, got to seem kind of silly. So now we have the carpentries. Okay. So what else can I answer for you? That's it. Good night. Oh, hey, short contest. No, that was the exact opposite of the order I thought it was created, because that's the order that I heard it in,

was I learned about the library carpentries first and then data carpentries. I didn't even know about software carpentries. I mean, I've seen software carpentries, but I didn't know, like, what the connection was or anything. Yeah, like, I look through all three, and, like, the baby's first lesson and all of them is always like, And this is Bash. And this is Bash.

Yes. And this is Bash. I teach that one regularly. I've taken that one, yeah. Locally. Yeah. Yeah. At UW Madison, the data science hub is kind of the center of of Carpentry's action on campus.

And so I'm kind of part of their core instructor cadre. And Sarah Stevens, actually, who runs Data Science Hub is now, I just, found this out today, actually on the executive board for the carpentries. So, hey, go Sarah. Hey. Shout out to Sarah. Yeah. Yeah. Doing good work. I'm looking at the software carpentries, and I notice that they've got a few of the, at least the basic ones also completely available in Spanish. Yes, they are that, that's relatively new, but it's a great initiative and I'm really happy to see them doing it. I was a helper earlier this semester.

at an R workshop, which was given in Spanish. And boy, my technical vocabulary in Spanish absolutely sucks. But we got through it. I was not the instructor. I was just a helper. But I definitely learned some vocabulary I had not known. And not the profane variety. That I know.

I think I've taken like two where like workshops where people, well, like one standalone workshop and then one like series. Mm-hmm. Where it was actually people teaching them. And then I've gone through a lot of the lessons by myself. Sure. Because they're all just up there. They are all just up there.

I think it was a library carpentry. I think it was at maybe it was at DLF back a few years ago where they did a Pymark, a Pymark one. Sure. Yeah. On the command line. And so you had to do a little bit of bash. Mm-hmm. And then doing Pymark.

I remember doing that one. And then the Boston Library Consortium had. One of the local, I forget which college or university in the greater Boston area has, I believe, a data carpentries, like hub with like certified instructors. But they offered a like series of Zoom workshops where they basically went through. And like, and here's Bash and here's this one where they did a couple lessons. And it was over Zoom. So. Yeah, I did a number of pandemic Zoom workshops.

I did a bash one. I did one for sequel. I think I helped for a Python one. But, you know, we were all locked down. What else were we going to do? Yeah, I was like, yeah, Bash, Baby's First Bash, basically data cleaning, stuff like that, why Excel is bad, but using it anyway, right?

If you must use Excel, here are the things you do so that it does not screw you over. You know how many times Excel has broken my library cards at my library? because of the... I believe it. Yeah, hate it. Well, you don't even have... Do you have an ILS? What do you run? Co-ha. We get through a consortium.

Okay. How's that working out for you? I'm looking at getting us a discovery layer because we're trying to move more digital. I'm looking into EDS right now just because we're already, we have like EBSCO e-books and stuff. Like, we don't have a lot of things. things. We have 300 students. But it's like, can we get like Naxos in there? Is it going to maybe start playing nice with our digital sheet music? And then are there any cool like outside feeds or resources I can bring into it? Like maybe like, I don't know, could I do some sort of like, like, does IMSLP have an OAI? Probably not. But are there other things out there that would have

OAI is that I could feed into it for sheet music. Sure. Probably the sheet music consortium. I wonder if they do. But yeah, like the way you create library cards, early library accounts and co-ha, like you can do it manually, but you can also upload a spreadsheet. And the numbers have to be 14 digits long. And Excel reformats them to have like the plus sign to shorten it. And like it would be.

on my end because I would go fix it in open or fine and like a lot of stuff. But then for our authentication, like our single sign on, we use something called one login, which I hate. And I want us to get an actual library authentication one and have it talk to one login because I hate one login. But then when my RIT guy would try to upload the accounts so that people could access their library account through our single sign on, those plus signs. meant it didn't work.

Yeah. Yeah. And like he was like, it like it kept reformatty, no matter what we did. So it was fun. And by fun, I mean that we didn't have working

library accounts for like the first two weeks of the semester. Oh, joy. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it was great. I could check things out to people, but they couldn't like go in and put holds and stuff because they couldn't get into the library accounts.

Ouch. I was pissy about it. Yeah, that's frustrating. Yeah. Especially I got COVID the second week of the semester. semester. Oh, no. So I was at home. Oh, I'm fine. Okay. I didn't have any symptoms. Oh. Yeah. Like, I had like an annoying cough because I was at the MCR concert. And I was like, I better check. And then it was COVID, but I like didn't have any symptoms beyond that. So I worked from home because it's the second week

of the semester. And I don't have any staff members. It's just me and some students. So, yeah. Anyway, derail our conversation. But Excel, be careful kids about uploading. anything that's digits long because it'll it'll fuck you up. Excel, Destroyer of World Economies. Yeah, like one thing it pointed at that in the data carpentry's class I took or was talking about Excel and data cleaning and formulas and stuff was that Excel doesn't go before, like, its dates don't go before 1900. So if you're a special collections librarian or an archivist.

Dates in Excel are the absolute worst. and you're working with materials in the 19th century, you're fucked, basically. Excel understands a million different date formats. The one date format it does not understand is the actual standardized date format, ISO-806-1. Like, what?

Microsoft, what? What are you doing? Besides screwing us all over with your horrible product. Yeah, this is the kind of stuff you learn in like data cards. Carpentries at least. And like this was taught to librarians. So it wasn't a library carpentries. It was data carpentries, but it was geared towards librarians. And so it was like, you know, like one of the things that showed was like if you're doing like, I don't know, like instruction session or like workshop statistics and stuff and you put putting those in spreadsheets and how do you do that. And then like cleaning data. And so pointing out what date limits. there are in Excel and all of these annoying things you have to look out for

that you really only otherwise would learn by having it fuck you over a couple times. Exactly. So you get to skip the getting fucked over and breaking your library accounts. Yes, you get to skip up the learning curve quite a bit. Yes, which is useful. And it's great because I could go take an Excel class and learn all this stuff, but it wouldn't be geared towards the type of work I'm doing. Right.

One of the things that the carpentries did from the very beginning was try to situate their lessons in then, of course, a scientific context, but a specific scientific context. So there's like data carpentries for ecology. There's, you know, carpentries lessons for various social science. They're actually pretty careful to be like, okay, this is the kind of data you would probably be working with. and here are some things you might want to do to it.

So, like, you wouldn't think a reference librarian would be fucking around with data and Excel, right? But if you're keeping track of, like, workshops and in sessions that you've been doing and who's attending them and all that, like, here's how you would collect that data in a spreadsheet. Here's how you might format that data. Here's how you might do, like, analytics with that data. Here's how you make sure that data is clean. like all the stuff that you might think is more in the realms of like tech services librarians or or stuff like that. Like it wasn't just geared towards tech services librarians.

Right. Which I think a lot of people think like, oh, this is just for the metadata folks. Oh no. No, no, no, no, no. Yeah, it is not just for the metadata folks. Like, you can get a lot out of it even if you're not like a metadata person. Absolutely. You do not have to be tech services.

You do not have to be the e-resource person. Oh, my gosh. them in their spreadsheets. Wow. Counter terrifies me. Mad props to all the librarians who actually understand counter because I do not. But yeah, there's a million uses for Excel in a library. Doesn't hurt any, but I mean, not the least of which, of course, is plain old ordinary budgeting, which is what Excel was actually built for. So a few more Excel skills won't hurt you. Very likely will make you stronger. And also like learning the command line and like some basic like reading text in the command line and editing text in the command line, creating files, stuff like that. Again,

they showed like situations where like a public services, a public facing librarian might want these skills. So yeah, if you're out there listening and you think, well, I don't do any of this techie stuff, it might make your life easier. It's like there's a book out there for learning Python that's just about like automating a bunch of shit on your computer so you don't have to do it all the time. Even if you're not a techie person, it's just like, are you annoyed having to do this every single time?

Here, we're going to learn how to write a script so you don't have to do it again. The book title is automate the boring stuff with Python. Automate the boring stuff. Very good book. I recommend it. And so it's like I get that kind of vibe from the carpet trees. It's like, hey, do you want to make your life? easier

than do this. You're not learning Excel or bash or SQL or whatever for the sake of of learning it. You're learning it because you want to do work with it, right? And the carpentries really

and I praise them. I honor them for this. They never lose sight of these skills need to be contextualized or nobody will bother. Absolutely. And granted,

some of them are more techy than others and maybe less relevant to people who aren't working with a lot of data all the time, especially once you start getting into the ones that are like, we're going to do Jupiter Notebooks. Although, Jupiter notebooks might be relevant for reference librarians. They're really good teaching tools. But like the more advanced you get with some of them, the more specific they become, I feel. But those like intro and beginner lessons in each of the subject. are like gold. They're awesome. They're actually super practical, yes. Yeah. And the pedagogy in the

carbon trees, this was the thing. So Greg Wilson himself a scientist didn't know anything about teaching when he started. He will be the first to admit this, by the way. I am not in any way, you know, dissing Greg. But it was something that he suddenly got very, very, very, very, very into, you know, pedagogy and, you know, the psychology of learning and a little bit of neuroscience, and he got super, super into this stuff. And if you, if you,

if you, if you, if you just didn't go through the process of becoming an instructor, you will find that that's a lot of what they try to speed run you through in, in the instructor training. And, you know, if you've,

if you're a liaison librarian, if you do library instruction on a regular basis, I got to tell you, you will find a lot of this stuff honestly super, super insulting. It is so basic. It was really frustrating for me because when I went up for certification, I've been teaching for a decade already. And I'm just like, can we skip to the good stuff here? I really don't need to be taught how to teach. But I get it also. They're working with scientists for the most part who are not, and research scientists, right? Not even scientists who themselves teach

at a university or whatever. These are people who literally know nothing about how to teach. And so the instructor training to a large extent is about speed running this specific type of person to the point where they can get up in front of a classroom and actually do a creditable job. And correct me if I'm wrong, but like, because I know library instruction and more formal like teaching, like obviously there's a lot of overlaps, but they are. different pedagogical styles with different goals and different techniques and different aims and

stuff. I mean, there's a lot of overlap, I feel like. And so I feel like even like librarians might not automatically like fit one to one into the pedagogical style. And so that training like is really useful. Maybe I mean, you know, other other librarians will go through this and we'll have a different experience. I found it really annoying.

truthfully. But it's only two days long. It's survivable, even if you find it annoying. And yeah, a lot of the librarians, well, I don't want to say a lot. Some of the librarians who will be interested in becoming Carpentries instructors will be coming more from the systems and data and consulting side of the house. And so maybe they don't have the practical background in teaching that a liaison would have. And so, hey, great. Again, the instructor training exists to kind of speed run you through some of that stuff.

There's also a very consistent structure to how the workshops are laid out and how you are expected to run them. I think useful scaffolding for just about anybody. So, you know, becoming a certified instructor was a little annoying. but the overall, the way the Carpentries works, that it's a non-profit instead of like nobody went for venture capital,

nobody tried to be a unicorn about this, that all their lessons are Creative Commons licensed. I have a lot of respect for all of that. Go Carpentries. Yeah, and so with the instructor training, there's only one training for all three carpentries. I believe that's correct. That didn't used to be the case,

but they consolidated all of that. Actually, this year, all of the people who had already been certified in any of the carpentries, I believe had a data carpentry specific certification. I now am certified to teach anything. I'm not actually capable of teaching anything, but I think the carpentries decided that their instructors were kind of self-selecting. Their instructors are the kind of people who know what they can teach and what they can't. And so they decided they weren't going to police that.

And the content of the instructor training is pretty much the same for all three anyway. So they were just like, to heck with it. You get one certification and you teach whatever it is in our, you know, broad umbrella of offerings that you feel capable of teaching. I wouldn't be surprised, Justin, to find that some of your confusions because they haven't necessarily updated all of their documentation to reflect this new reality yet. But yes, I got my new certificate. It is proudly hanging on the wall in my office, and life is good. Nice. And with the instructor training, there's like two different ways of doing it.

If you're a member organization. Yep. Or the Open Instructor Training Program, which one did you do? We are a member organization. So I was able to do it in a cohort. It was a cohort of most, my cohort was a cohort of mostly librarians. Well, I don't know about mostly, about half and half. There are definitely other librarians in the room.

A couple of liaisons so they and I could kind of roll our eyes in each other when the pedagogy stuff just got too annoying to deal with. But, you know, we could, this was pre-pandemic. So we were all just in a room together doing the thing, hanging out, having snacks. It was, it was kind of nice. Nice. Yeah. So you're a member through like your university. That's correct.

Not like a consortia. Okay. Right. Yeah, I doubt we are. I would probably know about it. So I'll have to look into the Open Instructor Training Program. You want to look through the Open Instructor Training Program. Although, you know, there might be a way to sneak in if there's a peer institution in your area that is a member.

I don't know that they check super, super strictly who belongs to which member organizations. So if you could build a cohort maybe with a member organization near you, that might be. But the Open Program, I think they'll be able. I'm pretty sure they'll be able to fit you in. I don't know about where you are, but where I am, we really want more instructors. It's been falling on the same, like, less than a half dozen people, four or five people for a couple years now. And so we're definitely trying to drum up interest and get more people certified. And when you teach a carpentry, like, which ones do you teach?

And how are they formatted, like, how long do you do them as workshops? Do you integrate them into a course? Yeah, the way. So I usually, I teach them through, as I said, the data science. And the way they typically do it is that they will string three or four together over the course of about two days. So usually we'll kick it off with either Bash or Excel. And they'll add on Open Refine, Python, maybe SQL. I mean, it depends to some extent on what people say that they want.

But I don't have to find that out. That's data science is a hub's problem. So we do that. they've been trying out having one day a week over the course of the semester and each week in the semester that specific day there will be a workshop

offered hoping to get people kind of in the habit of coming to workshops not totally sure how well that's worked out but they're still doing it so it couldn't have been that bad way back in the early days of software carpentry they would like do the week-long workshop model, but that was just, it was kind of too much. There's only so much you can absorb at a time. So I think what we found here is that two days, four workshops,

that people can feel that they learn something useful and see the possibilities, but they don't feel totally overwhelmed. So right, you ask what I typically teach, right? I typically teach Bash. I've also taught SQL. I have helped out. I haven't had to teach open refine. We have a couple of open refine. Super, super experts where we are. Usually that's Trisha. Trisha Adamus teaching open refine. Absolute open refined genius. Just really brilliant with it. So I haven't had to do that. I could if I had to, but I haven't had to. Right. So Bash, SQL helped out with Python and R could teach Python if I had to, would not want to teach R. I'm not good enough. I don't understand R myself well enough yet to do that. But to get certified, you only have to know one thing under,

again, the broad umbrella of the carpentries well enough to teach it. You do have to, as part of becoming a certified instructor, do a teaching demonstration. But if you wanted to do it with Pymark, right, since Jay talked about going to a Pymark workshop, you can do it with Pymark. I did mine with SQL because I know SQL kind of like the back of my hand. Then it was fine. They're not looking for you to be, I don't know, do we even have a paradigmatic brilliant teacher in LIS? I'm trying to think who that might be. Lois May Chan, we'll go with her.

You don't have to be Lois May Chan to pass your teaching demo. You just have to be reasonably competent. You have to be confident in what you're teaching. You have to be able to handle a curveball. They will throw you a really soft curveball of a question as you're teaching. And you have to be at least marginally familiar with the way that, with the rhythm, I guess I'll call it, of Carpentry's lessons. But that's not actually a big ask. It really, really isn't.

So all y'all who are listening out there in Libraryland, you, yes, you. you can become a certified Carpentries instructor. And maybe that will help you get a programming job. Possibly. I mean, you know, this is a form of library programming. What I tell my students actually is if they're interested in data librarianship, if they're interested in liaison librarianship and the sciences, right? For those, it makes a lot of sense.

It will look good for you on your resume to go ahead and put in the few days of effort that it takes to get certified. Yeah. And NASA will give you a lot of money. money to teach people how to use orchid IDs. Right. I'm really thinking of just like once we can move off some of the load of my department, just really focusing on teaching grants now that I know that they're out there and just

getting a bunch of money to teach. The bar is just really not high for some of this stuff. It's a weirdly, it's a lot higher in the library space. You want to go to IMLS for a teacher. teaching grant, you better be pretty serious about it. And there will be a number of skeptical librarians reviewing it. But NASA, apparently not. No, it really, I'll let everyone know how that grant goes.

We've got to send in the application early December, but. Good luck. Yeah, it'd be fun. But it seemed really simple. It was just you develop an open curriculum. Like, they give you the curriculum. They've created a curriculum called Core Open, which is going to be available in like April and you just have to teach it in the summer.

Yeah, that sounds easy. I have a million dollar question. Okay. Do you get paid at all to be an instructor? It's all volunteer. So yes, there are some, shall we say, labor issues there. But again, the origins of the carpentries was kind of scientist teaching scientists. and scientists tend not to be super hip to labor issues.

So here we are. I'm not saying it's inherently bad that this is like volunteer, especially the fact that all of the lessons are also just, you can just go look at them and do them yourself without the benefit of a workshop with someone you can actively ask questions. Yep. You can just go through them at your own pace. I've done that like a few times.

Workshops are nice, but. I think the assumption is that you're already employed and you're going to do this as part of your job. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why you have it. Like at your institution probably or you have a consortium. But then you could get an external grant and bring that in and cover costs for stuff that you want. It's kind of like getting paid.

Yeah. Like I'm wondering if maybe the Boston, like when I went to the Boston Library Consortium ones, because that was like for an entire consortium and not just one institution, if maybe there was something there with that. I mean, you could definitely sponsor. I mean, there's nothing stopping the institution from sponsoring it. No, not at all. Funding sources are probably weird, but it's not like centralized, which I think is good.

I think this is more or less a pretty good model in terms of the open education space. If you look at my colleague, Sarah, who I mentioned before, her, you know, keeping campus carpentries running is a large proportion of her actual. job description, right? So the logistics and quite a bit of the teaching, she teaches a lot of workshops. So there is what I guess I would call kind of a backdoor professionalization, if you will, where people, yes, are actually getting paid as in this, it is part of their job to hold and to teach and to help at these workshops. Yeah, I'm definitely starting to see some potential in terms of, especially what with the data science hub in terms of getting some

support for my institution because we've got a new head of research who's been brought in to make us an R1 because he did it at UTSA. Okay. So basically the library is trying to find ways to get money because we haven't been, we haven't had our budget increased in like seven years since we became a new university. So, yeah, if they'll let me hire like six people and run a data science hub, I'll do that. Well, our data science hub isn't not have six people. but yeah, I mean, you know, you might be able to pull off two or three.

I mean, pulling off one would be amazing at this point because we haven't been able to hire anyone in like three years. Yeah, I hear you. Yeah, I'm going to play. I'm going to bring all this back. We're doing this right before Thanksgiving, so I'm going to forget all of this, but that's why we recorded it. I'm just going to re-listen to this as my notes and then go back and follow up on all this. I think we're good to wrap up unless there was any. Anything else? Dorothy, was there anything going on that you wanted to plug? I know you've got new stuff going on at Spark. We're basically a Spark affiliate at this point. Close to. No, I am. Spark is interested in resource privacy, particularly as the big pig publishers, stop being big pig publishers and start being big pig data brokers, basically. Spark is not a fan and I am not a fan.

So I am currently working with Spark on putting together a resource library of elevator pitches and talking points about e-resource privacy to all of the, well, I don't know about all, but a lot of people on your campus that folks who are interested in e-resource privacy might have to talk to. So students, faculty, IT, general counsel, you know, we have all this laid out and we're going to try to try to. to build the best talking points that we can to get these people on our site. Yeah. And if you're a graduate student, because I know that's probably about half of our listeners or students. Nice. Hi, y'all. As far as I can tell, I would definitely recommend finding out if your institution is a member of Spark.

And then if you're interested in this stuff, seeing if you can get on the Spark list, because you can only do that as a member. And that's a really valuable resource. and you could also get involved with some of the spark goings-on. There's nothing stopping you. You can. The other initiative that's going on alongside the one that I'm co-leading is one for actual privacy-related contract language. Nice.

Yeah, really looking forward to the folks come up with. So good times. A lot of working groups. I'm looking forward to them. Okay, anything else you want people to know about? Just that Library Juice Press, ethics and link data coming out sometime this winter, and Ruth Kish and Tillman and I have a chapter in that on the ethics of LinkedIn sustainability. Ooh, spicy. Yeah.

We basically the authors of book chapters in that book, we all peer-reviewed each other's chapters. Nice. So there's a lot of good stuff, I can say with authority. There's going to be a lot of good stuff in this book. Nice. Great. Okay, thanks for coming back on and... Super happy to. Good night.