Hi all

To follow-up on some of the threads about what to learn and where and when...

As a non-coder cataloguer I've found it useful to take advantage of our Lynda.com accounts here and take a few courses to fill out my understanding of what coders are doing and also to understand some concepts around databases. I use databases every day but I think we spent one class on databases back in library school (way back in 1995!). The courses are brief, concise, easy to understand and great for learning some of the jargon. I'm sure there are probably some free courses out there that do similar things. The Lynda.com ones are:

Foundations of Programming: Fundamentals
http://www.lynda.com/JavaScript-tutorials/Foundations-of-Programming-Fundamentals/83603-2.html

Foundations of Programming: Databases
http://www.lynda.com/Programming-tutorials/Foundations-Programming-Databases/112585-2.html

In fact it would have been great to have done the Foundations of Programming: Databases before reading the FRBR entity-relationship model!

Some people learn well from finding a problem and just doing; I learn well from having some understanding of the big picture and the vocabulary and then I know how to ask questions or where I need to focus for a specific problem. For example, I understood the Code Year stuff (http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/code-year) a lot better after taking the Lynda.com JavaScript Essential training. I needed to hear someone explain the overall concepts and why it was used in order to understand the problems that code year was throwing at me.

So, depending on how you learn you may need explanations before hands-on and you made need to hear and see those explanations rather than read them.

To comment on Karen's question about macros -- at the moment I do very simple ones in Macro Express for our cataloguing module but I really want to do more!

Next I'm going to learn about web design, communications etc. so that I can better follow along and perhaps comment on the BIBFRAME stuff! So much fun stuff to learn.

By the way, I've been away from the code4lib mailing list for a LONG time because I've had enough keeping up with autocat-l and rda-l but after following the c4l13 conference on twitter I thought I'd come back! Hoping to see some of you again if we have another Code4Lib North.

Cheers,
Alison


Alison Hitchens
Cataloguing & Metadata Librarian
University of Waterloo Library
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519-888-4567 x35980