things I wish they’d taught me in library school

1) I think everyone should have to set up a website hosted on a server and learn to access it a few different ways: tunnel/proxy, CPanel, and become conversant in the terminology of domain name, server, host, etc.

2) How to do a WordPress or other CMS install on said server

3) Text scraping – how to write text scrapers (probably in Python)

4) How to work with APIs

5) Simple scripting for Excel, to work with large datasets and clean data

6) Probably there should be some over-arching project that teaches you how to utilize the above as you build towards it

7) I mean, it sucks teaching yourself this stuff and a lot of the documentation we’ve used in my library school class (I’m thinking W3 schools) kind of presupposes that there’s a certain way of THINKING – I really struggled with the order of operations in SQL and this wasn’t dealt with AT. ALL in the examples at that website.

I see the future of librarians as something like the kind of work this lady is doing but boy, is it going to be tough to get from where I am to where she is. at least i have a ton of datasets to play with and an extended social network of people who have serious programming chops.

anyway, I need to get back to work. I’ll have lots more to say later as my thoughts come together – watch this space for more meditations. Been thinking about this in light of comments by Deanna Marcum on “Educating the Research Librarian: Are We Falling Short?”

I guess library school was good in that I now have a pretty thorough understanding of that space but I guess in a lot of ways I’m not sold on “libraries” as a viable model (or even a necessary institution), period….

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