#alamw12: Member POV - Choose your own professional adventure

The seeds for a new Interest Group are planted. (Tweet by @ThatAndromeda)

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Monday was the #CodeYear meetup at Midwinter, where we talked about the new LITA Interest Group (IG) that’s in the process of being formed (the petition went around to be signed), good and bad qualities of Code Academy that could translate into improvements in how we develop a librarian community in talking about and supporting each other in coding, and also potential programs at future conferences.

Some background first, Code Academy is offering free, asynchronous, coding lessons in javascript so those new to it can learn at their own pace. Code Year was established for this being the year you learn to code, with a weekly lesson emailed out on a regular basis. Librarians are using the hashtag #codeyear to talk about the lessons on Twitter. I wrote a bit about this on my blog recently, with some pedagogical critiques as well.

There is an ALA Connect group to talk about the lessons and get feedback, and also a related wiki from Cat Code offering resources and even a glossary.

It was nice to see who else was doing the lessons and what concerns others had. I was certainly not afraid to say I didn’t understand some of the lessons, and it was reassuring to see others were confused at some parts as well. So clearly, there is a need for these support networks and the Interest Group is an exciting project underway.

And a quick aside about Interest Groups… I realized on Monday how easy they are to get started. You can go online and create a petition, or print one out if you’re at a conference, and you just need to come up with a name, a purpose, and then find 10 people who are members of the division to sign. I was actually hoping to create an IG as well for another purpose, and was able to collect all my signatures in a matter of minutes (pretty much). The IGs are great because they’re more informal and grassroots, and at the same time, after three years you either renew or they go into sunset so there isn’t over-saturation of non-active groups. At some point, they even might be able to turn into a Roundtable (worked recently for the GameRT, as an example).

So meetups, IGs, there are a lot of different ways to get involved with ALA, speaking to a variety of interests and professional focus. It's easy to find your niche or make your own.

Nicole Pagowsky is an instructional services librarian at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She is the creator of Librarian Wardrobe (librarianwardrobe.tumblr.com) and tweets (@pumpedlibrarian).