On Thursday 1 & Friday 2 June, about 12 Dutch librarians and experts gathered in the KB to join the Library Carpentry Sprint. Library Carpentry is a grassroot initiative that provides courses for librarians who want to learn the fundamentals of computing.
International collaboration
The courses are designed and taught by librarians and other experts. During the Sprint, volunteers on 13 sites round the world joined forces to amend, update and extend exisiting lessons. While the first volunteers started in New Zealand and Australia, the librarians in The Hague took over their work once their working hours ended. At the same time colleagues in London joined the sprint, eventually followed by librarians in the USA and Canada. The team in The Hague was led by eScience engineer Mateusz Kuzak and worked on Python and SQL lessons.
During the 48 hours, the teams in different countries regularly consulted each other via Skype, Github or Gitter.
Lessons learned
This was the first time the KB was host for the sprint and we learned a lot:
- It is fun to work with colleagues from different institutes in 1 room for 48 hours
- It is even more fun to regularly chat with people in other countries who are working on the same lessons
- However, you really need a lot of coordination to get a good overview of the locations of the latest version colleagues overseas worked on.
- Discussing issues both analog as well as virtual takes up more time than the actual working on the courses.
- At the same time: these discussions are very fruitful, interesting and a great kick-start fort he next steps to improve the exising lessons.
Outcomes
Do you want to know more about the outcomes, please read this excellent post by Belinda Weaver, one of the coordinators of the Library Carpentry Sprint.