News from the Library Carpentry Maintainer Community and Curriculum Advisory Committee

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

By Chris Erdmann

News from the Library Carpentry Maintainer Community and Curriculum Advisory Committee

During the week of 14-17 January 2019, Library Carpentry Maintainers met online to discuss a variety of topics from Communication Channels to Giving Credit. The discussions helped with tackling big questions and understanding how we wanted to work as Maintainers. For a summary (and notes) from the meetings, see:

• Summary Library Carpentry Maintainer Discussions 14-17 January 2019

Following the discussions above, Lead Maintainers (indicated by an asterisk on the ‘Our Lessons’ page) reached out to schedule online calls with the separate Maintainer groups. These calls were a chance for the lesson Maintainer groups to get to know each other, look at what needed to be developed in their lessons, and understand how they wanted to work as groups. Much of their work can be seen in the individual lesson repositories via the open Issues and Pull Requests. Links to the lesson GitHub repositories can be found at:

• Our Lessons

A number of lessons are still in beta status, meaning they are largely complete and should be ready to teach, but would benefit from improvements based on feedback from instructors who have taught them. Over the coming months, the Maintainers of these lessons will be working to move them to stable status.

Meanwhile, Curriculum Advisory Committee (CAC) members are looking into clarifying how the lessons can help librarians in their daily work. For instance, stories from participants of the workshops on how the training helped them address challenges in their libraries might help. The CAC is also exploring lesson combinations that address certain themes and help with delivering lessons more flexibly. Much of the Maintainer work will feed into the CAC’s ongoing discussions.

There are also new lessons being developed, from Wikidata to Digital Preservation. Many of the lessons are still experimental and are listed in the following Etherpad:

• Library Carpentry Experimental Lessons

We had super-productive "Wikidata education for librarians" session. Great foundations for our @LibCarpentry lesson but also useful for other formats. We will continue to work on it. https://t.co/4Bg0ukhxnn #WikiCite (Image source: https://t.co/kRlhYuVq0t) pic.twitter.com/RSJPAQNgUn

— Konrad Förstner (@konradfoerstner) November 30, 2018</blockquote>

One of the group workflows created for pre-ingest processes during our digital preservation carpentry workshop, & a great quote from attendees: “it gives us a glimpse of what success could look like” #DigitalPreservation #IDCC19 pic.twitter.com/c6FbGn0qfP

— Jaye Weatherburn (@jayechats) February 4, 2019</blockquote>

There will be more updates to come from the Library Carpentry Maintainer community and the CAC, but in the meantime, thanks to all of their work to improve the lessons and develop new lessons. If you are interested in helping out as a Maintainer for one of the Library Carpentry lesson, contact chris@carpentries.org.

Thank you Maintainers!
Carmi Cronje, Paul Pival, Shari Laster, Anton Angelo, James Baker, Belinda Weaver, Tim Dennis, Danielle Kane, Nilani Ganeshwaran, Owen Stephens, Juliane Schneider, Kristin Lee, Erin Carrillo, Chris Erdmann, Thea Atwood, Drew Heles, Katrin Leinweber, Eva Seidlmayer, Jez Cope, Sherry Lake, Erika Mias, Jordan Pedersen, Elaine Wong, Janice Chan, Joshua Dull, Thomas Guignard, Konrad Foerstner, Elizabeth Wickes, Laura Wrubel, Carlos Martinez, Richard Vankoningsveld, Jenny Bunn, Noah Geraci, Muhammad Elhossary, Till Sauerwein, Peter Neish, Jaye Weatherburn, Lachlan Glanville, Erika Mias, Catherine DeRose, Kristian Allen, Jay Forrest, Harrison Dekker, Katrin Leinweber, and Mark Laufersweiler.