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Systems Librarianship 101

Lessons on hard and soft skills for new systems librarians

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Artistic rendering of computers

Welcome to Systems Librarianship 101. This series of lessons is designed for library staff who are new to systems work. You might be at the beginning of your library career, or you might have previous experience in other functional areas of librarianship like cataloging or circulation and recently assumed responsibilities in systems. The topics will cover both hard and soft skills you might find useful as you learn to implement, troubleshoot, and support library software and technologies.

The Orbis Cascade Alliance will present these lessons on Systems community calls from September 2024 through June 2025. Recordings will be posted to the lesson pages after the calls. Though the materials are written by and for Alliance central and member staff, we strived to make them product-agnostic to apply to a variety of institutions.

Alliance Resources

Systems Documentation: If you’re a new systems librarian within the Alliance, see this page for resources contributed by colleagues at member institutions, including the Primo VE and API toolkits, Alma Analytics trainings, and more.

Systems Demonstrations: This page links to recordings and materials from presentations in Systems community calls back to September 2016.

Alliance Email Lists: Announcements and conversations on current topics take place in the Systems Discussion email list. Archives are available to subscribing members through Google Groups.

Other Systems Trainings

Library Carpentry Lessons: The complete lessons and materials for Carpentry workshops are freely available and licensed under CC-BY 4.0. Topics include general skill-building in UNIX, Git, and Regular Expressions; courses in specific software like OpenRefine and MarcEdit; and more advanced lessons on programming in SQL, Python, and R.

Citations

The image at the top of this page, “Three computer monitors sitting on top of each other. Binary monitor particles, computer communication,” was published on Pixabay prior to July 2017 under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication license.