PDA Event: TIL: Creating Open Documentation Through Public Note-taking and Literate Programming

Presenter: Jay Colbert, Metadata & Discovery Strategy Librarian, University of New Hampshire

What do you do when you're an early career librarian, in a new position, and learning a new software? You seek out the knowledge and expertise of other librarians who have done the work before. But what if the existing documentation is sparse, incorrect, or nonexistent? In this presentation, I provide an autoethnography of learning Primo VE and its development environment, which includes the challenges I faced when consulting official documentation and my process for finding instructions and tutorials from other librarians. I also stress the importance of making personal and institutional knowledge public, and I provide methods of public note-taking to create open documentation, such as literate programming. By incorporating learning in public as a community practice, metadata librarians, systems librarians, and other library workers who work in technical services and related fields can create a shared corpus of invaluable knowledge for ourselves and future librarians.

Register for this event.

Sponsored by BLC.