On a wet and windy day in August 2024, at our own TL Robertson Library, Curtin University Library hosted a Library Carpentry ‘taster’ session for members of ALIAWest – the West Australian division of the Australian Library and Information Association.
The Carpentries is a worldwide community of instructors whose mission is to teach software and data science concepts and skills. Library Carpentries includes relevant lessons and exercises for library and information management communities.
Library carpentry workshops are organised by qualified instructors and usually take place over one to two days, either face-to-face or online. Curtin University Library has a number of qualified Carpentries Instructors, including Academic Skills Advisor (Numeracy) Claire Hulcup, Digital Learning Specialist Drew Fordham and Coordinator, Research Services John Brown, who all guided the very enthusiastic group of library, research and industry professionals and students of ALIAWest through the two hour, relatively intense ‘taster’ session. The session was fully booked with 25 participants attending.
The session began with an introduction to the Carpentries programs and philosophy, with participants sharing their current data workflow needs and approaches. The session then continued with a ‘mini’ Library Carpentry workshop, with our instructors leading participants through ‘hands-on’ coding in R and Python to analyse and visualise data in typical library workflows. The session concluded with a demonstration of the possibilities with Linked Open Data using Python and Wikidata.
Analysing and visualising library data using coding offers many advantages. Workflows are fully documented by the written code and can easily be repeated or updated many times by simply running the code again. This approach allows for automating data workflows, including producing high quality graphs and visualisations with code, and also allows the results to be effortlessly reproduced by others. The support community for the freely available R and Python is vast, as is the range of analysis and visualisation tools available. Visualisations can also be interactive, guiding users to perform the analysis most relevant to them.
The Carpentries use interactive coding tools such as Jupyter and R Notebooks, which allow the code and presentation of results to be run, documented, shared and reproduced in many formats, including web pages. Though not part of the Carpentries, our Data literacy with R guide on Curtin University Library’s academic skills website UniSkills is an example of the interactive coding lessons we run in a workshop for Curtin University staff and students, presented as a webpage for self-directed study.
Many thanks to Nicola Carson, ALIAWest Convener and Curtin Library staff member, for organising the session.
Please feel free to contact us if you are interested in Curtin University Library potentially hosting a Library Carpentry session for your organisation.
Written by Drew Fordham, Data Learning Specialist
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