What have the Library Carpentry Maintainers been working on?

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

By Chris Erdmann

In January 2019, the 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.

See News from the Library Carpentry Maintainer Community and Curriculum Advisory Committee

What have the Maintainers been up to since then? This blog post will catch you up on what all the lesson Maintainer teams have been doing since January. The following are brief reports from the lesson Maintainer groups:

Introduction to Data
Shari Laster*, Paul Pival, Anton Angelo, James Baker, Carmi Cronje
The Maintainers met for the first time in February. They discussed how they will work together and agreed to reach out to Instructors that have previously taught Introduction to Data to gather their feedback and determine their next steps towards improving the lesson. Their next meeting is in May.

The UNIX Shell
Danielle Kane*, Nilani Ganeshwaran, John Wright, Anna Oates, Belinda Weaver, Tim Dennis
The Maintainers will meet on 25 April 2019. Members of the group have already expressed interest in adding more library examples (context) to the lesson.

OpenRefine
Erin Carrillo*, Owen Stephens, Juliane Schneider, Paul Pival, Kristin Lee, Carmi Cronje
The Maintainers have been working on updating information about the OpenRefine versions used in the lesson and Paul Pival volunteered to address outdated issues.

Introduction to Git
Chris Erdmann*, Thea Atwood, Drew Heles*, Katrin Leinweber, Eva Seidlmayer, Belinda Weaver, Jez Cope
The Maintainers for this lesson met in March and decided to reach out to Instructors that have taught the lesson for their feedback. Eva Seidlmayer developed concept maps to help guide the group’s discussions. Some of the core lesson concepts that the group focused on during the discussions include file sharing, versioning, collaboration with researchers, and publishing websites. There are still some remaining questions for the Maintainers to consider, for instance, whether it is best to teach git on the command line or via GitHub/GitLab and how the lesson compliments other available lessons (like Software Carpentry’s Git lesson).

Tidy Data
Sherry Lake*, Tim Dennis, Thea Atwood, Erika Mias, Jez Cope
The Maintainers will meet in the next 2-3 months.

SQL
Jordan Pedersen*, Kristin Lee, Chris Erdmann, Elaine Wong, Janice Chan
The Maintainers have met 2 times and agreed to create a set of issues to outline their next steps to improve the lesson. They initially reached out to Instructors that have taught the lesson, to gather feedback, and help inform their work. They recently added library examples to the lesson to help people in library and information related roles understand why they might use SQL in their work.

Webscraping
Joshua Dull*, Thomas Guignard, Belinda Weaver
The Maintainers hope to review the lesson this summer and invite new Maintainers to help.

Introduction to Python
Laura Wrubel*, Konrad Förstner, Drew Heles, Elizabeth Wickes (Past Maintainers: Carlos Martinez, Richard Vankoningsveld)
The Maintainers have been reviewing several repositories with Python-related lesson content, cleaning up outstanding issues and pull requests, and working on revised learning objectives and a lesson design document. They are taking a fresh look at the interfaces used in the lessons (e.g. Spyder and Jupyter) and planning to use their design document to guide lesson improvements.

Introduction to Data for Archivists
Jenny Bunn*, Noah Geraci, and James Baker
This lesson is still looking for new Maintainers as the current Maintainers have moved on.

Wikidata (Experimental Lesson)
Muhammad Elhossary, Till Sauerwein, Konrad Förstner
The Maintainers and lesson volunteers held a brainstorming session at WikiCite 2018 in Berkeley which laid the foundation and set the scope for the lesson. There have been 3 sprints with the latest one in April. Members of the community are invited to join the sprints which are announced on the Wikidata mailing list.

On the near horizon, Maintainers will be looking into whether their lessons are ready to formally publish (for example, see this OpenRefine issue). Also, the community will be working on improving Library Carpentry material in an upcoming Mozilla-Library Carpentry Global Sprint this May.

The best way to track the work of the Maintainers is by looking at the issues and pull requests in each lesson repository under the Library Carpentry GitHub organization. If you are interested in becoming a Maintainer, please contact Chris Erdmann.

As always, thank you to the hard work of our Maintainers!