I completed another MOOC!

Couple of months ago, I decided to enrol in a Coursera Specialisation, Python for Everybody, because I’ve not overcommitted myself. The course is developed and taught by Professor Charles Severance, aka Dr Chuck, who is so passionate about education and open educational resources. He has a Coursera logo tattooed on his shoulder, he explained why in his Tedx talk (00’29”).

Yesterday, I completed the first course of the 5-course specialisation (Did I make it sounds like degustation? I have not had breakfast yet). For me, this first part is very easy because of my previous life as a web programmer, all I needed to learn is the syntax, functions, and vocabularies. In my line of work, I deal with data a lot, and automation and getting computers to do the repetitive tasks are important in a lot of things that I do: data cleansing, pattern tracking, batch processing and so on. I have picked up bits and pieces in the last couple of years, I attended Rails Girls to learn Ruby, I have tried Codecademy but never finished any of the courses. I have used various tools to create data visualisations, infographics, and crosswalk, and have been able to achieve most of what I want to do by reverse engineering, lots of Googling, asking silly questions on Stack Overflow etc.

But I’m at a point where I really want something more solid than that to reach my next goal – to create web based, data-driven apps and data visualisations. Python sounds like to cool language for this purpose, so I have been looking for learning materials and courses. I found the Uni of Michigan MOOC on Coursera and decided to do the specialisation, which will cost me $485. To me, the cost is rather modest, considering some one-day training course provided by my professional association usually costs at least half of that amount. Also, I’ve been consciously trying to fix one of my weaknesses – lack of tenacity to complete long term projects. Paying for a course is definitely an incentive for me to stick around and hopefully complete it, it’s going to be an experiment 🙂

I like the title of the MOOC and I believe everyone should learn programming. Should we just rely on professional programmers to do all the programming for us? There are apps and programs that definitely should be left for the professional programmers, but we should have a go at learning how to get the computer to do things for us. In the old days, makers can make things by learning how to build things by hand and create something physical, e.g. knitting and lego. In today’s world, if you don’t know how to program, you can’t make things in the digital world and eventually be left behind.

I have done quite a few online courses and I can’t say I enjoyed all of them. I really like Dr Chuck’s teaching style, he explains ideas very clearly in multiple ways (but you don’t feel like being talked at like a three year-old), he’s humorous and engaging. The moderators, teaching assistants and fellow students are very helpful and supportive. The MOOC is very well put together and I highly recommend anyone to take the MOOCs, the first 2 courses of the Python specialisation are free.

(Cod* OR Program*) AND librarian*. Any results?

I’ve been in coding mode for about a week tackling 2 post-it notes that have been put off due to other higher priority things my procrastination.

The first task was to establish an automated process for registering DOIs for a journal we host in the institutional repository. The cons of having a proprietary system is that your vendor will not give anything away when you’re trying to do something they offer as additional service, so pretty much I have to start from scratch. I’m happy that I knocked out this one without too much struggle. I created a DOI generator with Excel VBA. Then I wrote an XSLT stylesheet to transform the OAI XML to CrossRef XML. I can’t remember the last time I hand coded an entire document, it would have been when I worked as a web developer many moons ago, I was a PHP whiz. Time has certainly changed, XML, XSLT and Xpath are so much easier to understand.

The other task I’m currently working on is to export the data from citation databases like Scopus, clean up the data, semi-automate the copyright checking process, and batch load metadata and full text documents into the institutional repository. I followed the logic of the article, Using XSLT and Google Scripts to Streamline Populating an Institutional Repository. I imported the references to EndNote and exported the reference list as XML, the data is very clean, but it lacks affiliation information, which is crucial to us. So I started exploring the Excel export which gives me the “author with affiliation” field as one loooong string… I spent the afternoon trying to figure out how I can populate the spreadsheets properly and pick up all the correct affiliations and search the staff directory for author’s faculty/school/research centre information (which is usually missing from the database export) with minimal human intervention.

Anyway, I’m not going into further details here, most importantly I haven’t figured it out yet 😛 I thought I’d put it out there, I’m just wondering if there’s someone out there doing similar things. In the past few days, I feel a bit isolated, I can’t talk to my colleagues and bounce ideas because nobody here knows how to code. I can contact colleagues from other libraries but I have yet to come across another librarian who codes, I’m sure I’m not the only one trying to do this.

If you are or know of anyone who are coding for your library, perhaps we should connect, have a chat about what we’re working on, what programming languages or tools we know or want to learn. We can also meet regularly to share ideas, learn from each other, and see if there’s opportunity to collaborate?

Even if you don’t know how to code but want to acquire this skill, let’s connect too. I mean, if you can construct the above Boolean search, you already know how to code 😉