2019 Election: Juliane Schneider

Who am I?

I am Juliane Schneider, and I’m a restless soul with a flair for boredom and weird career paths. Currently, I’m Team Lead/Lead Data Curator at Harvard Catalyst, Clinical and Translational Science Center. My past jobs have included Database Designer for EBSCO, Metadata Specialist with UCSD Research Data Curation Program, Metadata Librarian for Countway Library at Harvard Medical School, and I once was an insurance librarian on Wall Street despite knowing nothing about insurance (I learned things, though).

Why Carpentries?

I never wanted to teach. I was a metadata librarian who liked working with research computing centers and developers to build things. And then….Tim Dennis talked me into going to this weirdly named instructor training (Carpentry? Do I get to play with drills?) taught by some guy named Greg Wilson, and I was hooked.

Not only did I discover that I loved the process of learning how to instruct effectively; after complaining for years that we spent too much of our time and money learning skills that we never used, this directly addressed that problem by adding immediate context. I found out how intriguing lesson development could be, akin to a complex reverse-engineering puzzle.

The other reason that I want The Carpentries to do some serious world-domination is that for researchers are under immense pressure., the pressure. Funding, benchwork, presenting, IRBs all clamor for their time. For librarians, the pressure is to do presentation-worthy projects while re-engineering workflows as a disruptive innovator.

Learning and eventually becoming expert in useful, cross-disciplinary tools can ground you, help you turn off the noise, give you confidence and the foundation to do amazing things.

Why me?

After I received my instructor training, I and my UCSD colleagues held one of the first Library Carpentry workshops in the United States (July 2016). Since then, I’ve taught many more workshops, and have become an instructor trainer that’s trained new instructors online and in person. I am a maintainer of the LC Open Refine lesson and contribute to the regex material in the Intro to Data lesson.

I can bring to The Carpentries a cross-lesson mindset. While I teach the LC lessons, I have background in working with developers and researchers, so I can be a bridge between all of the Carpentry lesson programs.

From 2013-2015, I was on the Board of Directors of Special Libraries Association (SLA), an international association of 6000+ people. I know what the fiduciary and oversight responsibilities are for nonprofits, and the challenges that face them in a world of shrinking funding opportunities and ever-expanding communication channels.

Community

I’d like to see The Carpentries continue to grow strong local communities, and make sure that we have the infrastructure to support them.

Instruction

Continue to grow our already fantastic mentoring program, and get our newly minted instructors instructing as soon as possible.

Lessons

Let’s turn those beta lessons into alphas! We need to continue to grow our content and test out new lessons in order to keep up with what our potential Carpentries learners need.