Good examples of training or professional development programs for librarians to gain digital/tech skills

Question

One the goals at MPOW is to help more librarians gain skills related to conceiving, building, and maintaining digital projects. I'd welcome examples of successful training programs for helping librarians gain fluency with digital methods and tools.

I'm aware of more general opportunities such as the Digital Humanities Summer and Winter Institutes (http://dhsi.org/ and http://mith.umd.edu/dhwi/), or the Data Management Roadshows in the UK (http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/data-management-roadshows/), as well as programs like Stanford's "Tooling Up for Digital Humanities" workshop series (http://toolingup.stanford.edu/?page_id=3).

Obviously, librarians can participate in any of these but I'm particularly interested in library-specific examples.

Full disclosure: I helped created the Digital Humanities Winter Institute (and would like to help make it useful to other librarians)

Answer 1

This is a hard question. For all the lip service paid to reskilling in academic libraries, there seems to me to be very little evidence it's happening, much less push to make it happen.

So the programs I know of are oldish and grassroots:

• 23 Things and its many, many, MANY offshoots; if you're looking for wild successes, this is pretty much all you'll find
• Five Weeks to a Social Library, which is now more interesting for its delivery model than its content (disclaimer: I was part of this back in the day; if you have questions about it I'll be glad to answer them)

I know there's a passel of librarians helping each other through Codecademy at the moment.

These aside, it seems to me that what you'll find is a haphazard shedload of pre- and postconference sessions, the occasional IMLS-funded weekend or week, and the occasional vendor-hosted installfest or training session.

Answer 2

I am not sure the following is exactly what you had in mind, but here goes.

Good examples of successful but (I think) no longer held workshops are Cornell 5 day workshops in digitization and digital preservation. Those were a great blend of theory and practice and the digitization tutorial online is still useful (I actually use it all the time to discuss digitization techniques and standards combined with my own institutions best practices) though old.

Rare book school still teaches beginning TEI but their advanced TEI was a really great class. I also heard great things about their EAD classes.

Archivists seem to have an easier time: SAA has a lot of classes on EAD, Archivist's toolkit and now a whole Digital Archives Specialization. I'll just say I looked at some training from LITA and i was interested: like this class: http://www.ala.org/onlinelearning/management/classes/lita/webservices

I have took one very focused class from Amigos a few years that was very good, an online though synchronous class. It was a good way to try out the technology. Lyrasis is the other big provider of classes, some of which are online.

If you are a cataloger, there's a lot of training at different times of the year. They have their own training culture which I am not that familiar with. They all seem to be learning RDA, whether through classes, webinars, etc.

I think the bottom line is these programs are expensive and unless its something like RBS or SAA and you have a mission to educate, libraries don't have the capacity to keep these going for very long. I think most librarians I know who "keep up" try lots of different things including classes at community colleges, workshops wherever they can find it (if they have funding) and keeping up with Code4lib and listservs. There are webinars through NISO and ASIST too.

I don't know what advice to give you, Trevor because I think its a big question. I'd start with your own institution and see what training would be useful there. I did the training that was useful for me: I think that is the important thing. You won't be useful to everyone so you might as well make the people at MD happy!

Answer 3

You might want to check out the code4lib community. There has been a yearly conference, interspersed with several local meetings. There is also a good contingent of folks who "multi-task" with an IRC chat window open, which is a great source of inspiration and fun.