Library Carpentry sprint in June

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Lesson maintenance is necessarily an ongoing task, especially with fledgling lessons where workshops taught reveal gaps or issues with existing material. Development of new lessons may also spring from the same source. Who hasn’t thought, after teaching: “Wouldn’t it be great if we could add x?”

But lesson maintenance and new development are probably best done as a shared activity, which is why the Library Carpentry community has signed up to work on lessons intensively during the 2017 Mozilla Science Lab global sprint on 1-2 June. Check out our sign up etherpad for information about our plans.

This is a call for librarians - and archivists too - to join the sprint. You don’t need to be a coder to help out. Perhaps you can be a site host - finding a room for people to work together. Or maybe you have ideas about what should be tackled, or even a scenario or a dataset that could be used in a workshop.

Perhaps you have a task you have always wanted to automate? Or maybe there is something about how you work that frustrates you? Chances are that other people find the same snags in what they do, and would welcome a new way out of that frustration maze.

Ideas are gold for sprinters, so we really welcome ideas on what to teach and how to teach it.

At this stage, we plan to work on consolidating our SQL and web scraping lessons and building a new Python lesson. We would also welcome input on our more established lessons such as Data Intro and OpenRefine. See the full list here.

How can you get involved?

• Join the sprint - even if only to say hi or suggest things we should do (we love feedback)
• Add to the issues we are tackling here
• Pop into the chatroom and tell us what you want/don’t want
• Publicise the sprint in your library or workplace
• Encourage people to join us for some or all of the sprint
• Follow Library Carpentry on Twitter and help spread the word.

So far, we have five sites committed to host people working on the sprint - two in the UK, one in Australia, one in the Netherlands and one in the US but we are hoping Canada, South Africa and New Zealand will make it eight (and there is always room for more).

People are also signing up to work remotely, which is good as we are seeing new people joining up.

Please get on board !