 Okay, welcome to the Library Carpentry Project update. I'm Tim Dennis. I'm the Director of the Social Science Data Archive at UCLA. That's when you see UCLA up on the slide, even though library carpentry is not like a UCLA exclusive product or anything. So don't be confused by that. My colleague John Shadacki couldn't join us today. He's on the program. So it's just me, solo. All right, so be kind. All right, so I'm also a software carpentry instructor and instructor trainer in that community and involved in this library carpentry movement. So who knows what the carpentries are, software and data carpentry. So hands, do you know how they work? Kind of, sort of, yeah, okay. That's good. So I'll give you a brief history. They started, software carpentry started in the late 90s, but started by a guy named Greg Wilson, who is a computer scientist from Toronto. But he mainly started because he was working in the national labs, Los Alamos, and he encountered all these scientists who were doing computational research but didn't know how to code or do software development, right, in a disciplined way. So they started there, went through many manifestations, kind of like a short course format, one day, they even did a video online thing, early MOOC, and finally kind of arrived at the current format for most software carpentry workshops, the two-day boot camp, where you teach a programming language like R or Python, teach Git, inversion control and importance of that, and then teach Bash Shell. They had generous funding in 2012, which kind of solidified the financial foundation from this loan of fun, and then data carpentry started somewhere around 2012, 13, by a person named Tracy Teal, who's the executive director, and that was geared more at discipline-based modules for working with data, data analysis. You can see this kind of how it breaks out. They both share like a volunteer network, they're instructors, for data carpentry, the audience is pure novices and who are working with data, they have domain-specific lessons, lessons on ecology, genomics, GIS, there's a social science lesson that's coming out, and they, again, they focus on data analytic concerns, data cleaning, data management, data visualization. Software carpentry is more about like best practices of software development and coding and teaching researchers how to do this and it's agnostic to kind of domain. So those are kind of two differences, but they share the nature that it's volunteers who are teaching and both are interested in filling the skill gaps that researchers encounter in their computational research. This kind of shows you the ecosystem of the carpentries. It's a community of practice model. Situated learning is kind of its focus, so we want to encourage pure learning in a workshop, right? Newbies come into a workshop, they gain confidence, it's a big component, we go slow, so they gain confidence, easy wins, through exercises and applying these skills. They learn, they meet peers they might learn with after a workshop, they become better, they might become instructors in our community, but there's a real big focus, what you see is that we want to provide a warm and kind of safe environment for the learned skills that are difficult to learn. It's a big component of the carpentries. You can see it has grown tremendously. We have taught software and data carpentry, this is for both taught workshops to over 22,000 learners in 35 countries. So it has scaled pretty spectacularly and the number of instructors are growing, we're training more and more, we're training more people like me who train instructors, right? So this is all like this, it's a network model that is global in reach and it's been really successful. And in January, this coming January, the carpentries will merge, I mean the software and data carpentry group will merge, they started separately into something called the carpentries. And if you're, if you are having aversion to the word carpentry, you might want to leave because it's carpentry this, carpentry that. We have an HPC carpentry and I'll talk about library carpentry. There's an author carpentry. So these are proliferating. And what the idea is is that you have an umbrella which will help with the financial and funding kind of needs, the infrastructure, hiring staff, and you have these learning organizations underneath them. I mean, lesson organizations underneath them who are responsible for, we'll share the infrastructure but the lessons are different based on audience, you know, in need of the specific audience of a lesson organization. So what's up with this library carpentry thing? James Baker, who worked at the British Library as an archivist attended a software carpentry workshop held, taught by Greg Wilson, who was the founder of software carpentry. And Greg kind of wondered out loud, why are there so many librarians going up to these software carpentry workshops? What's going on here? And so out of that hatched the idea, hey, we should try the library carpentry. The needs and concerns of librarians are just as palatable as researchers but it's focused on a different domain. So that was the idea. So James, together with three other collaborators, created four modules, get something called data basics or data intro open refine for data cleaning and bashell and they gave a workshop in 2015. So what does library carpentry do? It introduces you to the fundamentals of computing and provides you with a platform for further self-directed learning. So the artifacts we create, the lessons, they're up in GitHub, they become websites, they're consumable for you after the workshop. They have a lot of resources. There's too much content to teach in one workshop, so that's by design. So you winnow down what you can teach in one workshop with the idea of going slow and making sure that your learners kind of dictate how fast and how much you cover and then after the workshop, you have a whole set of resources they can consume. So that's a good thing, right? And then we also, one of the primary things is we cover a similar to software carpentry. It's like why you would automate? Why you don't wanna manually repeat things in some kind of gooey tool? Why you wanna do things in a scriptable way? Why that's important? And then we wanna develop a common vocabulary and set of practices so librarians can better engage with IT staff, research technical people, or just the current research that's going on. So you can understand what artificial intelligence are the components of it, a little better, right? So we wanna have a common vocabulary. It struck me, I read recently, that most sizable portion of people that go into undergrad CS programs don't have any intention in programming for a living. They're gonna go into IT organization type institutions or companies and they need to have the vocabulary to be able to communicate. Same kind of concept here, that's part of what we're trying to do with library carpentry. We also, it's primary concern to work with data. So teach data kind of how to use and understand data and context. So we use article data, the article bibliographic data set in our workshops. We also use the text from the book, Little Women, as part of kind of where we create word frequencies and bashell. So things that are very familiar to librarians. We're always looking for better data sets too to form lessons around. So if you have any ideas, shoot me an email please. We also wanna better understand the use of data and software in a research environment. So essentially the idea is we learn more of these tools we can understand what's happening around us and on a campus and better engage in that. We can also maybe down the line, really teach researchers who are coming in how to use these tools, right? So it's a reciprocal kind of relationship where we're kind of aimed at. So this, since we're a community of practice, we want this for and by librarians. This is a grass root movement, right? We wanna utilize what works well with the carpentries. So we wanna use, we're using their infrastructure, we're using templates that they have built or we have built, I'm one of those volunteers in the software carpentry community as well. And we have lesson templates that we utilize. We use basically right now we're using, if somebody asks for a workshop for software carpentry for library carpentry, they'll, their staff will email us, right? So that's, we're kind of riding off their good graces right now. We wanna make a positive and warm learning environment. That's essentially, that's crucial to what we wanna do because coding is intense, is intimidating for many people, especially librarians maybe, if they're not close to this kind of thing. At the core, library data and software carpentry is a volunteer organization. It's a network, right? And what it does, what all of those do is share and comment. They develop training materials. They train instructors to teach those materials that are well-founded, research-based, pedagogical techniques, right? So we want to get what actually works. We organize workshops to teach computing and data skills and we support this, I think a larger goal is to develop a community of practice, communities of practice in specific locations. So if we're successful, like with library carpentry, we'll see these communities kind of pop up in different libraries and it'll be more than just some guy coming to do it or a woman doing it, a workshop and then disappearing and nothing happens, right? So we also focus on tools. So it's rather than kind of an opaque, monolithic, built GUI tool, right? We want to teach you how to build things with tools rather than using built things, like in GUIs or whatever if you can supplement Excel if you want for that last part. We like open source tools and we buy us to tools that we can script or we can capture operations that happen to data. So this whole reproducible research concept. So we definitely, we're in that mix and we're supportive of it. Okay, I'm gonna go over briefly on the lesson development. Greg Wilson recently co-authored this article on collaborative lesson development and library carpentry really gauge in the first six of these and we have aspirations to do more. We are continually working on who our audience is. We write learner profiles for their lessons which is good practice, but when we teach, we get feedback, oh wait, you're missing the digital library people or something in a library. So libraries are not monolithic, right? They have many different parts and pieces. So we want to be responsive and this is an iterative thing to define your audience. So we also know that modularity and lessons are very important. When we first started, we just had slides and word documents, but we've broken those up into chunks that are more digestible by our learners. So modularity and lesson development is essential as we move on. So then you can kind of almost Lego-like piece together some curriculum from our curriculum, right? It's also important pedagogically, you don't want to overwhelm people with too much facts because they can't assimilate it. So you want to have a few things in an episode that you teach and then have some reflection and exercises that kind of reinforce that. So that's all part of what we do and we've done that in the last two years with library carpentry. We want to promote best practices and instructors. They're gonna be going through instructor training which is primarily about pedagogy and lesson development, so best practices in those. And we also have encouraged and distributed kind of responsibility for the lessons through GitHub so we have maintainers for each lesson that kind of moderate what goes into the lesson, like improvements over time. And then really building a community is the most important thing. A community that sustains because people change jobs and they can't do as much as they used to do. So that's gonna be a natural kind of lifecycle of a community. So building that in a sustainable way is super important for us. So once again, James Baker started in 2015. There was four contributors at that point. They had four lessons. They were more as intended to just one off, one time only. But word got out in the software carpentry community. James connected with a woman named Belinda Weaver in Australia, who's a powerhouse. And she with him worked together to develop the network in a community with Library of Carpentry. So as of two days ago, we have 32 contributors to our lessons. We've added lessons in Python SQL web scraping in addition to improving the existing lessons. We use Gitter, which is a group communication tool and kind of integrated with GitHub to talk amongst ourselves and say, hey, would it be better if we have a module in X? Oh, let's work on this together. So this has been a very helpful tool for us to develop the community. And then we've had two sprints in 2016 and 2017. The one in 2017 was particularly impactful. This is a sprich, you could think of it as a hackton for two days. Mozilla Science supported it. And in 2017, we had over 16 sites from New Zealand, Australia, Netherlands, UK and the US. We had over a hundred participants over those two days. We had a zoom up where we'd pass the baton as the sun went around the earth where I would talk to the British library. They say, oh, what did you do while I was sleeping? I would get the baton and then I would talk to New Zealand at the end of the day. So it was a real vibrancy and kind of interest. Like it was really a wonderful experience. And we had over 800 contributions to the lessons during those two days in 2017. So it really helped improve the lessons as well. And once again, this is an example of Gitter. This is how we talk to each other. This shows you kind of the cycle of what's happening here at the top. You teach a workshop, right? You're an instructor or you attend a workshop. We have these little minute notes, which we take at lunch and noon on post-it notes. One thing that went well, one thing that what didn't go that well. Use that kind of in your head as a, you try to address some things in the workshop. If it's too cold, you pop up the heat or if you're going too fast, you try to slow down as an instructor. You get back, you jump on Gitter and you reflect. Okay, what happened in that workshop? What was good, what was bad? You might share that with the community. And then the final step there at the top left is you contribute changes to the lessons to make them better, right? So this cycle goes on all the time. And then you can see other things happen here when you build a community through these workshops. People in that workshop might wanna teach. That's great. Next time you be a helper. We have a role as a helper in the carpentries. And then they'll be an instructor. So it's like this nice iterative cycle and each kind of loop we're improving lessons, we're improving our teaching through reflection. All this stuff is really good, right? It's a powerful model. So in the other way we build capacity is through instructor training. So earlier in May this year, I co-taught with Belinda Weaver in Portland a software carpentry instructor training so you get certified to be an instructor in Portland that was sponsored by CDL UC3 and John Shadacki and it was dedicated, most everybody in that picture are librarians, maybe two or three aren't. But the idea is you say, oh, we're gonna have this course but we want you to teach workshops after. So the agreement is they're gonna go forth, they're certifying and teach workshops, library workshops, the library carpentry workshops for us. We wanna have more of these that are dedicated to librarians so we can build the capacity. Okay, well, you know, this thing doesn't exist without teaching workshops. So what have we done in two years? You can see I put it on a map. Australia is blown up like that partly because Belinda, the powerhouse person I mentioned earlier, is really like was pushing it in Australia and she did road shows with library carpentry. But you can see we have global reach. We wanna improve North America, we've just like five or six. So that's hopefully one of the goals. I can talk about it in a little bit. So we've had 30 different cities and 10 countries. In 2015, we had one, it was in November, it was the first one. 2015, we, 2016 we had 18 and 24 and 2017. So approximately we have 800 learners attend these workshops. I'm gonna show you some pictures from them. So that's Pittsburgh. You can see James Baker's teaching there, the guy who started it. That was part of the data science and libraries. I am a less funded workshop. Townsend, Australia. I can't read my own thing. What does that say? Upadova, Padua in Italy. It transposed my text to black in my slide view. Yell out what it is for me, please. UCLA, that's right, Belinda Weaver's teaching. Johannesburg, I taught as part of that. And then we have some more. This is Oslo, that's Sheffield, that is Cape Town, yes. And Christchurch, and one more Perth. So you can see, so the cool thing about it, I wanted to put all these pictures up basically because I wanna say, we taught all the same lessons. We're just teaching from a common curriculum. And the people teaching are part of this volunteer community that improve the lessons, improve their teaching, and recruit new people to teach. This is the whole model. And it's really kind of, if you see a global reach like this, I mean, it's already demonstrated its offer of carpentry scales. But I think this has a great hope for scaling in the library community, right? This is a way that we can really address some of the skills gaps that we have. Another reflection, I put some of the community on a map. Just shows you we have folks in Australia, South Africa, Europe, USA, and Canada. Don't forget Canada. That's a partial list of folks in the community. So the next steps. So we've done all this good work the last two years. It's pretty hopeful. The lessons have improved dramatically. We're gonna be adding new lessons. It's, we wanna add new volunteers and members of it. But what are some of the concerns and challenges? So we have scaled up, I mentioned 32 contributors. So probably 20, 25 constants participants in this community. We've scaled up beyond what a small volunteer community can handle. Like we reached our limit really. You know, we don't have our own infrastructure really built in funding. We're doing this, it's a grassroots kind of organization. But now we need to kind of figure out how we skill up our people. What we teach, we need to have some type of governance organization, a steering committee, and how we conduct ourselves, right? So all that stuff we need to work on, the kind of building the infrastructure. Currently we don't share assessment instruments across our different workshops. That's a weakness. So it's ad hoc, right? So we're not knowing what's happening in those workshops. We do post it minute notes, but we don't really share those across that we can utilize it analytically to kind of improve how we're doing. And we need, you know, we need to get the interest of funders. We need to kind of solidify our financial kind of infrastructure. All right, but all is not lost. We've made some recent developments that are exciting. So CDL, one of the most excited recently, CDL UC3 received an IMLS grant to fund a coordinator role for two years and also support building the infrastructure in North America. So this is somebody at the other end of the phone when somebody requests to workshop. They say, oh yeah, yeah, you can find people in your region or whatever. There's two instructors here. So we can put this on. So we definitely need that ability to have this, have some kind of support role in library of carpentry. And also that role will help develop, you know, hold like sprints like Belinda did in the last two years so we can improve the lessons, recruit instructors, have more instructor training like we did in Portland so to build capacity through libraries. So all that will be benefit, the North America will be benefited by that, right? For the IMLS grant. The other good news is we held a community call in October and we generally agreed that we wanna merge with the carpentries. We wanna be a lesson organization within the carpentries infrastructure. We've already been writing free off of their good graces. So we're gonna charge a steering committee and then elect members in the new year to start working on that merger process and negotiating with the carpentries. And we also, the last thing I think we're gonna align our kind of assessment, our ad hoc assessment program with how the carpentries do it. Carpentries has a assessment director, Dr. Kerry Gordon, and they're already doing a lot of analysis on their kind of survey. They do pre-assessment, post-assessment, and then six months later assessment. So they're already have a program for this and have reports. We're gonna plug into that so they're fine with it. And the cool thing is we can kind of do some inter-carpentry analysis in the end. We can see how we're doing compared to the other cohorts and the other carpentries. So that would be really helpful for us as we move along. And I think that's it. But yes, this is a vibrant community. We welcome new members, new interested people. If you have any questions, you can email me or fortunately in a short time, I think they'll have this coordinator role and we'll have a real email that will be part of the carpentries. So stay tuned for that. But email me in the interim. It's Tim Dennis at ucla.edu. And I could forward that to the coordinator when we get one on staff. And thank you. I want to call out there's two. So John and I were the co-presenters. But Julian Schneider from Harvard and Tracy Teal who's the executive director of carpentries both kind of helped with his proposal. So I want to acknowledge that.