CILIP MDG Library Carpentry, sponsored by The University of Manchester Library

Online

Thursday November 12, November 26, December 03 and December 10

9:30 am - 12:30 pm

Instructors: Nilani Ganeshwaran, Phil Reed, Carlene Barton

Helpers: Jane Gallagher, Rosalind Bell

General Information

Library Carpentry is made by people working in library- and information-related roles to help you:

Library Carpentry introduces you to the fundamentals of computing and provides you with a platform for further self-directed learning. For more information on what we teach and why, please see our paper "Library Carpentry: software skills training for library professionals".

Who: The course is for people working in library- and information-related roles. You don't need to have any previous knowledge of the tools that will be presented at the workshop.

Where: This training will take place online. The instructors will provide you with the information you will need to connect to this meeting.

When: Thursday November 12, November 26, December 03 and December 10. Add to your Google Calendar.

Requirements: Participants must bring a laptop with a Mac, Linux, or Windows operating system (not a tablet, Chromebook, etc.) that they have administrative privileges on. They should have a few specific software packages installed (listed below).

Accessibility: We are dedicated to providing a positive and accessible learning environment for all. Please notify the instructors in advance of the workshop if you require any accommodations or if there is anything we can do to make this workshop more accessible to you.

Contact: Please email nilani.ganeshwaran@manchester.ac.uk for more information.

Roles: To learn more about the roles at the workshop (who will be doing what), refer to our Workshop FAQ.


Code of Conduct

Everyone who participates in Carpentries activities is required to conform to the Code of Conduct. This document also outlines how to report an incident if needed.


Surveys

Please be sure to complete these surveys before and after the workshop.

Pre-workshop Survey

Post-workshop Survey


Schedule


Syllabus

Tidy data for librarians

  • Using spreadsheet programs for data organization
  • Formatting data tables in Spreadsheets
  • Formatting problems
  • Dates as data
  • Basic quality assurance and control
  • Exporting data from spreadsheets
  • Caveats of popular data and file formats
  • Reference...

OpenRefine

  • Introduction to OpenRefine
  • Importing data into OpenRefine
  • Layout of OpenRefine, Rows vs Records
  • Faceting and filtering
  • Clustering
  • Working with columns and sorting
  • Transformations
  • Advanced OpenRefine functions
  • Reference...

Introduction to Working with Data (Regular Expressions)

  • Introduction to Regular Expressions
  • How can you use regular expressions to match and extract strings
  • How do you find and match strings with regular expressions
  • Reference...

Introduction to TEI

  • Introduction to TEI
  • Elements and Attributes
  • Descriptions and Cataloguing
  • Reference...

Setup

To participate in a Library Carpentry workshop, you will need access to the software described below. In addition, you will need an up-to-date web browser.

We maintain a list of common issues that occur during installation as a reference for instructors that may be useful on the Configuration Problems and Solutions wiki page.

Install the videoconferencing client

If you haven't used Zoom before, go to the official website to download and install the Zoom client for your computer.

Set up your workspace

Like other Carpentries workshops, you will be learning by "coding along" with the Instructors. To do this, you will need to have both the window for the tool you will be learning about (a terminal, RStudio, your web browser, etc..) and the window for the Zoom video conference client open. In order to see both at once, we recommend using one of the following set up options:

This blog post includes detailed information on how to set up your screen to follow along during the workshop.

OpenRefine

OpenRefine is a tool to clean up and organize messy data. Please find instructions to install it and the data used in the lesson in the lesson.