Library Carpentry Community Update

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

By Chris Erdmann, Belinda Weaver

Report-back from CarpentryCon and the latest governance call

Things are moving along nicely in the Library Carpentry community, helped by regular meetings of the governance group and lots of face to face talking at the recent CarpentryCon event in Dublin, where we ran a Library Carpentry Onboarding Workshop. Many people at CarpentryCon were keen to talk Library Carpentry. We are now firming up our ideas about our audience, and what constitutes a workshop, and we are currently discussing how we can get more workshops organised and more instructors trained. (We hope to announce an instructor training event shortly.)

CarpentryCon was a big success in many ways, but it also helped jumpstart important Library Carpentry initiatives. A group of Library Carpenters including David Kane, Stella Wisdom, Scott Peterson, Daniel Bangert, and Josh Quan led our efforts to describe the audience for Library Carpentry lessons. This will ultimately help new instructors wishing to learn more about our community ahead of teaching or developing lessons. While developing the audience page, inclusiveness was a strong theme. Feedback on the page is welcome via this open issue and we can use your help in listing demographic and job description material from additional countries.

Our Governance Group reviewed this issue along with the issue of what constitutes a Library Carpentry workshop (see the open workshop overview page issue). Group members discussed creating a ‘Library Carpentry Express’ overview, in addition to the current page, for workshops that are taught in a day or less.

Library Carpentry Governance Group calls are scheduled for the second Monday of the month from 16:00 - 17:00 EST. This means that many members of the group sacrifice their evenings and mornings to chat in unsocial hours. Thank you to Kayleigh Lino in South Africa and Belinda Weaver in Australia for braving our most recent call on 11 June. Others present on the last call included Tim Dennis, Cam Macdonell, and Chris Erdmann.

Two other important topics were covered during the call :

• the pre- and post-workshop surveys that we use
• the creation of a Curriculum Advisory Committee for Library Carpentry.

Squaring away our surveys is a top priority for us. You can find the current discussion of the proposed changes to the surveys here.

Both Software and Data Carpentry now have curriculum advisory committees, and Library Carpentry will need to create one as well. We discussed voting to form the new committee during our next call in July.

If you would like to see what the Governance Group is currently working on and contribute your feedback, you can find all of our issues here.

Community input is very important to us so please weigh in on any issue that is important to you.