As library technologists, programming & web development allow us to create interactive applications that help to facilitate discovery and delivery of information resources to library users. This is a discrete skillset that often involves coming up with novel solutions to previously usolved challenges.
When you learn programming there are lots of different directions you can go with it. You can manipulate data, run statistics, create visualizations, develop games, write generative novels, and more.
Much of the work we do in libraries and archives involves discovery and delivery of resources and information to end users. And the foundation of how we do that work is the web. We can make digitized unique special collections available to the world on the web for free. We can serve users with information guides. We can promote our services and the people in the libraries who can help students and faculty. It is possible to create some web pages for these kinds of use cases and put them up on the web with a commercial tool or even a static site generator. You don’t necessarily need to know how to program to get important content up on the web. (This workshop site for instance was developed with the static site generator Hugo.)
But there are other cases where the content and results change based on user input or some other factor. We can create custom faceted interfaces for searching within collections where the results narrow. We can enable workspaces for textual annotation for specific scholarly use cases. We can save our colleagues time by creating new tools to automate parts of a rote task. We can show the libraries hours for today.
Web development is a common way in which we can deliver these new resources and tools to the world. We’re going to give you a quick overview of web application development. Web development is the craft of developing dynamic applications. It involves both the creation of the interface users interact with and the business logic used to change data and feed it into that interface. If you need to allow for user input and to change the response you make based on that input, then web development can help.
Where it really gets interesting in applying software development skills is in creating something that’s never existed before. Lots of challenges in libraries are archives are still not solved. Having web development skills means that you can deliver your novel solution to world more readily.