General Info
When: Friday, May 2, 2014
Cost: $15 per workshop (note: lunch is not included)
What: Four half-day workshops are being offered at two different venues in Downtown Vancouver. See below for further details.
Register at: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/2014-code4lib-bc-spring-workshops-tickets-11107666329
Who: A diverse and open community of library developers and non-developers engaging in effective, collaborative problem-solving through technology. Anyone from the library community who is interested in library technologies are welcome to join and participate, regardless of their department or background: systems and IT, public services, circulation, cataloguing and technical services, archives, digitization and preservation.
As a Code4Lib event, we adhere to the Code4Lib Code of Conduct, which seeks to provide a welcoming, harassment-free environment. Please see the Code of Conduct for further details.
Special thanks to Vancouver Public Library, Simon Fraser University, and the BC Libraries Cooperative for their support in making these workshops possible.
Locations and Schedule
At VPL Central (Peter Kaye Room)
9:00am-12:00pm Web/Usability Testing on a budget! / Cynthia Ng
12:00pm-1:00pm Lunch Break
1:00pm-4:00pm Introduction to Designing for the Web Today: HTML5, CSS3, and JQuery / Schuyler Lindberg
At SFU Harbour Centre (Room 1500)
9:00am-12:00pm Intro to Python / Alex Garnett
12:00pm-1:00pm Lunch Break
1:00pm-4:00pm Intro to Archivematica / Mark Jordan
Workshop Descriptions
Web/Usability Testing on a budget!
With Cynthia Ng
- If you take care of even a small part of the website, you want to have some kind of feedback from your users. However, you’re just one person, and you have a budget of $100. What do you do? This session will give you some hands on practice using a few methods to help you do some usability testing on a low budget.
- Please bring a laptop, multiple sheets of paper, and at least one pen.
Cynthia Ng is currently on contract as an Accessibility Librarian at the Centre for Accessible Post-secondary Education Resources BC (CAPER-BC) housed at Langara College. She takes a holistic approach with focus on users to improve library websites. She also frequently volunteers as a mentor at technology events.
Introduction to Designing for the Web Today: HTML5, CSS3, and JQuery
With Schuyler Lindberg
- A practical introduction to HTML5, CSS3, & JQuery, this workshop will cover the fundamentals of modern front-end web design. Not your typical “hello world!” code-from-scratch approach, it will demonstrate how to ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’ and take advantage of open source tools and templates to very quickly construct a fully-functional, responsive, HTML5 web site. Bring a laptop and your favorite text editor (I recommend Sublime Text). No prior experience necessary.
Schuyler Lindberg completed his MLIS at SLAIS in 2012, and after a stint as a Digital Asset Management Consultant at BC Hydro, began his current role as Interaction Designer for Digital Projects at UBC Library Systems & Information Technology where he tests, designs, and develops user interfaces for library web applications. He is currently building a unified portal for the library’s digital collections
Intro to Python
With Alex Garnett
- This 3 hour workshop will introduce the fundamentals of Python as a first (or second) programming language. It will provide an overview of syntax, best practices, and how to get from A to B in simple, purposeful tasks, taking string parsing as an example. This will include a brief review of (relatively) sane approaches to doing iterative development on your own, including how to solve errors on a case-by-case basis, without having to read coding manuals from cover to cover. Participants are strongly encouraged to bring their own machines (Windows, Mac, or Linux okay) so that they can walk away from the workshop with a workflow that works for them.
Alex Garnett works on Data Curation and Digital Preservation at SFU Library. Most of his coding is self-taught, which is a good thing when it isn’t a bad thing. He doesn’t always like it when he hears people start evangelizing about how everyone should learn to code, but he’s caught himself talking about how some people really ought to learn really useful and fun things like string functions on occasion. He has strong feelings and a bad back.
Intro to Archivematica
With Mark Jordan
- This 3 hour workshop will introduce Archivematica as a comprehensive, ready-to-deploy digital preservation platform. We will also cover basic preservation planning and long-term management of preserved content. Participants will have the opportunity to run Archivematica on their own laptops.
- Preparation for the workshop: Please come with a Mac, Windows, or Linux laptop that has the most recent version of VirtualBox installed. (Note that virtual machines will run slowly on computers with less 4 GB of RAM.) A virtual machine image running Archivematica will be distributed at the workshop. Participants who cannot bring a laptop will be partnered with someone who has one.
Mark Jordan is Head of Library Systems at Simon Fraser University. His current obsession is automating digital preservation processes but he is also interested in a lot of other things.
