A quick post in support of my lonely hearts ads for this year’s UKAD Forum. I’ve submitted two – slightly concerned this makes me look rather archivally-geekily dissolute… Anyway, these were inspired by a chance conversation on twitter a few weeks back with a couple of archivists who had signed up in January for the Code Year lessons, but had found it hard going and fallen behind.
So firstly:
- Digital professional, likes history, cake, structure & logic, hates dust, WLTM archivists interested in learning programming, for fun and comradeship.
I’ve posted here previously that I have occasionally mulled over the possibility/feasibility of some kind of online basic programming tutorial for archivists, and this even gathered a very welcome offer of assistance. But I hadn’t taken the idea any further for a couple of reasons (a) I wasn’t sure of demand and (b) I think its really important that any tutorial should be based around real, practical archival scenarios. I know from experience that it can be difficult to learn tech stuff (well, perhaps any stuff) if you can’t see how you might apply it in personally relevant contexts. So, if you’re an archivist, what I’d like to find out in the comments to this post is why you’re interested in learning how to program – specifically in which archives-related tasks you hope such skills could usefully be applied.
And secondly:
- Tech-loving archivist seeks passionate, patient devs with GSOH to help teach archivists to code.
Because I know I couldn’t put together what I have in mind on my own, and because I’d be embarrassed to show any of my code to anyone. Those two things are linked actually: on a good day, with a following wind, and plenty of coffee and swearing, I can cobble together some lines of code which do something useful (for my purposes). I am all too aware I am using perhaps 5-10% of the power of any given language, but then again if it works (eventually, usually!) for my purposes, perhaps 5% is all the function I require (plus the confidence to explore and experiment). I need any real programmers interesting in helping out to understand all of that. The aim here would be to put together a simple tutorial for beginners based around day-to-day archival tasks. From programmers, I’d be interested in ideas of how to put together this tutorial, including what language(s) you might recommend and why.
I have absolutely no clue whether or how this might come off. Maybe the only UK archivists interested are the three of us who talked on twitter. Maybe we’ll decide its too much effort to tailor a resource specifically for archivists (and I do have the small matter of a PhD thesis to write over the next few months). Maybe we’ll find there’s already something out there that’s perfect. Maybe the consensus will be that archivists’ time would be better spent brushing up their markup skills, or learning about database design, or practising palaeography or something. I just don’t know, but UKAD is all about networking and getting people together from different fields but with common interests in archives. Or, as one archivist tweeted: “Wanted to be able to have halfway-sensible conversation with techies” – now there’s a challenge!
I’m an archivist and I’d like to know more about programming to get more of an understanding of what’s easy for programmers to do, what’s difficult and why something is one or the other – as this is something that constantly surprises me.
For me, the obvious application of having more knowledge and skills in this direction would be helping to create ‘better’ finding aids (whatever ‘better’ may mean in that context). I’d hope that less obvious ways of applying such skills would become more apparent to me if/as-and-when I started to acquire them – perhaps something to do with creating and maintaining better research guidance, but I’m not quite sure what or how.
I signed up to the code year lessons full of enthusiasm to learn – I still get the emails once a week but I am so far behind I will never catch up! A resource for archivists would be something very useful and I would love to be involved if possible – especially if any tutorials are based round practical archival senarios
I am an Archivist and very interested in programming tutorials!
Thanks for all your comments, here and on twitter. Please keep them coming, particularly *why* you’re interested and examples of things you like to be able to do if you had more technological know-how (whether this involves coding or not).
My desire to know more about coding is the same as Andrew’s really. I have skills in writing HTML and stylesheets but not programming. It’s really about being able to fit all the pieces of the puzzle together – knowing how applications work to deliver things to users, to allow them to explore and use the content we want to make available. I feel that, as a profession, we lack this knowledge and there needs to be more of us delving into it a bit deeper. I don’t think every archivist should be doing it, but some of us should.
Right now, I’m getting my head around web services – we dabbled in using the CALM API last year to try and build a better catalogue interface but we didn’t get very far. I’d like to learn why.
Thanks for the tweet pointing me to this post. As an Archivist who is very interested in computers and technology in general, I am very excited about the possibility of working with other archivists to develop programming skills.
I’ve recently got very interested in digital preservation and how archivists interact with technology, and have come to the conclusion that there is not enough of the sort of easy to understand jargon free tutorials you suggest around for people to utilise. I started blogging on this issue a while back and have posted a quick tutorial on how to install and begin using the open source cataloguing software ICA AtoM that I hope will encourage people to have more confidence to dive in and ‘have a play’
My other half is a programmer, and I am constantly jealous of his ability to suggest solutions to problems I am having while I’m at work (such as cataloguing software not being able to display results in a certain way, working out the best way to maximise the potential of an excel spreadsheet, creating a basic records management database in access). We’ve even sat down together and he’s taught me a few helpful things here and there,
Basically, I’d be interesting in learning about anything that could help make my life easier at work. Whether it be creating a database to help generate reports for disposal of records, writing a script to pull records from a catalogue and convert them to EAD or just learning how to use software to create better finding aids.
Not all of this involves programming as such, but I do think a basic understanding of these concepts will help archivists to become more confident when conversing with ‘technical types’. I’m a firm believer that ‘tinkering’ is the key to this. Everything I know about computers comes from playing around with things and seeing how they turn out.
I’ll be watching developments with interest and would be very interested in getting involved. Thanks again for pointing me here!
[...] any technically minded Archivists who want to learn to program, posted by Alexandra Eveleigh, is here. Have a read and please do comment on why you would want to learn and what you think it could help [...]