Tim Dennis on The Carpentries

Calling Community Pilots: 14 New Open Science Lessons for Library Carpentry

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Lessons for Librarians in Open Science Principles and Methods project, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), has reached an exciting milestone. Over the past two years, we’ve worked with 27 expert authors across 14 teams to develop 15 new lesson repositories focused on open science for librarians.

Ten Years of Library Carpentry

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

November 2025 marks the tenth anniversary of the very first Library Carpentry workshop at the Centre for Information Science, City University London. Past and present contributors to the lesson program got together last week to celebrate the milestone, share their memories, and express their gratitude for the many successes of the project over the last decade.

Calling for new Lesson Program Governors

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Lesson Program Governance Committees (LPGCs) of Library Carpentry and Software Carpentry are looking for new members. This is an exciting time for both projects as they consider expanding their range of workshops. Joining the community governance body is a great way to guide the development and support the progress of a lesson program.

What is a Lesson Program Governor?

LPGCs oversee the strategy of the lesson program, advocate for the project in their networks, and act as a point of contact for the project e.g., liaising with the Board of Directors, the Core Team, and the wider community. Learn more about the powers and responsibilities of the committees in a previous blog post and check out the Lesson Program Governors Handbook for other resources that support this community role.

Library Carpentry Curriculum Advisory Committee Approves a Major Update to the LC Python Lesson

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

We are excited to announce that the Library Carpentry Curriculum Advisory Committee (LC-CAC) has approved a major update to the Python Intro for Libraries lesson.

The lesson demonstrates how to use Python to clean, analyse, and visualise library usage data, providing an introduction to reproducible workflows in Python for library and information workers. While the lesson repurposes some elements from the previous Library Carpentry Introduction to Python, it is a major overhaul that includes a new library-specific dataset, the use of JupyterLab instead of Spyder, and new episodes that use Pandas to tidy a dataset and Plotly to visualise data.

Library Carpentry Curriculum Committee Approves Data Management Plan Lesson

Tue, 11 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

We are excited to announce that the Library Carpentry Curriculum Advisory Committee (LC-CAC) has approved a new lesson Data Management Plan Course for Librarians for inclusion in the Library Carpentry curriculum. This course was developed as part of an Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant to UCLA to develop open science lessons for Library Carpentry.

This course provides an introduction to conducting data management plan (DMP) services for librarians. By the end of this course, librarians should be equipped to offer basic DMP review services to researchers.

Advancing AI Education in GLAM: Highlights from the Library Carpentry Code Sprint

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The lesson maintainers for Intro to AI for GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) and the Library Carpentry Curriculum Advisory Committee (the LC-CAC) co-hosted a seven-hour online code sprint on Jan 31, 2024 to help contribute bug fixes, edits, and improvements to this popular new lesson.

With the aim of moving the beta lesson closer to a stable release and adding it to the core Library Carpentry curriculum, a diverse group of global participants gathered to work on the lesson. Fourteen participants with a range of affiliations and expertise collaborated together during shifts that were hosted throughout the Sprint by Phil Reed, Cody Hennesy, Tim Dennis, and Leigh Phan. Participants included representatives from Hugging Face (UK), the University of Manchester (UK), the Medical Research Council at the Gambia Unit at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Smithsonian Institution, the State Archives of Baden-Württemberg (DE), The National Archives (UK), the University of California, Los Angeles (US), the University of Minnesota (US), and the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Join Our AI for GLAM Lesson Code Sprint - Library Carpentry, January 31, 2024

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

You’re invited to a code sprint for the Intro to AI for GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) Library Carpentry Lesson on January 31, 2024! The lesson maintainers and the Library Carpentry Curriculum Advisory Committee are co-hosting an open online sprint for anyone in the Carpentries community who wants to help contribute bug fixes, edits, and improvements to this important new lesson. The lesson introduces artificial intelligence topics and tools to galleries, libraries, archives, and museum staff. This is a great way to engage with the Library Carpentry community - all are welcome!

Lessons for Librarians in Open Science Principles and Methods

Sat, 17 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The UCLA Library is pleased to announce a call for proposals for Lessons for Librarians in Open Science Principles and Methods, a two-year (2023-2024) project funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Service (IMLS) to incentivize lesson authors to develop and refine seven lessons each year through two-year sequential summer workshops. This initial call is for lesson proposals to form the project’s first-year cohort (2023).

The project seeks to support continued skills development for librarians in open science by creating a librarian-focused curriculum. Led by the UCLA Library Data Science Center, the project will award each recipient (individual or group) with $5,000 for developing an open science lesson. Authors will design and refine lessons through summer workshops utilizing the Carpentries Curriculum Development guidelines and the Collaborative Lesson Development Training program as frameworks for curriculum development. The program was designed by a team at UCLA, including the chair of the Library Carpentry Curriculum Advisory Committee (LC-CAC), Tim Dennis, and certified Carpentries instructor Zhiyuan Yao. Inspired by the Carpentries’ evidence-based teaching and learning model, the team will work closely to align new lessons with existing Carpentries’ lessons, and leverage the Carpentries’ technical infrastructure to create new open-source lessons on GitHub. In addition, a member of LC-CAC will serve on the project’s Review Committee each year with an eye toward aligning new lesson proposals with the existing Carpentries curriculum. One potential project outcome will be a series of new lessons for possible integration with Software, Data, or Library Carpentry curricula. A broader goal of the project is for librarians to increase their aptitudes in the principles and practices of open science, so that they can provide instruction to researchers and better support faculty by advocating and teaching open and transparent techniques.

I See, UC, We All See Carpentries: Collaboratively Scaling Workshop Instruction Across a University System

Thu, 07 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

This Carpentries workshop ran online over the course of 3 weeks.

Week 1: Unix shell, Git/GitHub, SQL (one lesson per day, 9am-12pm)
Week 2: R (3 days, 9am-12pm)
Week 3: Python (3 days, 9am-12pm)

Following the success of the virtual Southern California Library Carpentry workshop, Carpentries instructors from UC Los Angeles, UC San Diego, and UC Berkeley decided to run a joint Carpentries workshop open to students and researchers affiliated with these three University of California (UC) campuses. The plan for this workshop was to run online sessions over the course of three weeks. The primary idea and goal for this workshop was to further connect a Carpentries network across the University of California campuses. Similar to the Southern California Library Carpentry workshop, this joint UC workshop came together because of the already established collaborative partnerships between the Carpentry instructors at these three campuses. Tim Dennis at UC Los Angeles proposed the idea for this workshop to the other campus instructors, Reid Otsuji at UC San Diego and Scott Peterson at UC Berkeley, to begin planning the workshop. Each of the hosts reached out to Carpentries instructors on their campuses to gauge interest in teaching in this workshop. There was a great response and interest from the community of instructors at all three campuses.

Library Carpentry Advisory Group Call for New Members

Tue, 08 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The Library Carpentry Advisory Group acts as a key friend to The Carpentries governance and Core Team and advises on ways to foster greater participation in the Library Carpentry community. The Advisory Group discusses, plans, and pursues strategies for involving new and current members in Library Carpentry. Members of the Group volunteer to serve three year terms, with increasing levels of responsibility and leadership each year.

Benefits of Being on the Advisory Group

Advisory Group members have the opportunity to work closely with a global community of librarians, archivists, and information professionals dedicated to expanding data and computational skills in library and information science communities.

Teaching a Library Carpentry Workshop in Southern California (and the Virtual Yonder)

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

From August 10 to 13, we taught a virtual Library Carpentry workshop to 18 librarians, primarily from California.

Our Audience

Our primary audience was librarians and library staff from the California State University (CSUs) system, a system that is relatively new to the Carpentries. When we first planned this workshop, we planned to teach it in-person at the California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) campus and therefore we anticipated our audience would be mostly from Southern California. While we missed the benefits of in-person connections and interactivity, our instruction team was excited to be able to reach a much wider audience across the CSUs. We had attendees from all across California, from Humboldt State in the north to San Diego in the south, and many points in between. Additionally, we opened up slots for librarians from other California academic libraries and also had one international attendee from South Africa!

Lessons Learned - Teaching Carpentries Workshop Online UCLA Spring 2020

Tue, 16 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post was originally posted on the UCLA Library website. As a member of the Carpentries, we offer Carpentries and Carpentries-styled workshops.

Introduction

Between April 10 and May 1, the UCLA Library Data Science Center offered four online 3-hour sections in R programming from Software Carpentry’s R for Reproducible Scientific Analysis. Our usual in-person workshops have a capacity of 30 learners and a typical waitlist of 20. Our attendance for the online course ranged from 30-50 with a waitlist of 250. Our learners primarily consisted of UCLA graduate students in business analytics and social sciences.

What constitutes a Library Carpentry workshop?

Tue, 07 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

By Chris Erdmann, Belinda Weaver, John Chodacki, Juliane Schneider, Jez Cope, Kayleigh Lino, Tim Dennis, Cam Macdonell

Given that Library Carpentry currently has nine lessons on its books, and a couple more in draft form, the question of exactly what constitutes an ‘official’ Library Carpentry workshop is timely.

On 17 May, Belinda Weaver opened an issue about this question, proposing what lessons should be taught for a workshop to be badged as Library Carpentry. The issue asked others in the community to comment. The issue received 10 comments from Chris Erdmann, Jez Cope, Kayleigh Lino, Juliane Schneider, Veronica Ikeshoji-Orlati, Greg Wilson, James Baker, and Lauren Ko. Out of the current Library Carpentry lessons, the bulk of comments identified Introduction to Data, the UNIX Shell, Introduction to Git, and OpenRefine as the core lessons that should be taught at a Library Carpentry workshop.

Seventy-One Workshops... and Counting

Wed, 01 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

By Belinda Weaver, Chris Erdmann, Tim Dennis, Juliane Schneider, Carmi Cronje, Jez Cope

Seventy-one Library Carpentry workshops have now been taught around the world, including one-day, two-day, and multi-day events, with future workshops being added every day.

With this milestone behind us, it is important to pause and appreciate what has been achieved so far by the community. Since 2015, more than 102 instructors and 123 helpers, 225 in total, have contributed to Library Carpentry training events in 13 countries. We have collaboratively developed open educational lessons to teach software and data skills for anyone who works in libraries or similar organisations.