From The Turing Way Guide for Project Design:
“A persona is a detail of an imaginary user or member, based on real-world observations and understandings of existing members or potential future members. It is meaningful when paired with pathways through which these personas engage with a project.”
These two personas are an initial draft to get the ball rolling and suggest the type of people who might be interested in taking part in a GLAM Data Science network and why. They are not intended to be exhaustive and the plan is to collaboratively expand these initial two into a more full description of our community.
If this sounds interesting to you, please get in touch! You can join our chat room on gitter.im, comment on this GitHub issue (“Network member personas”), or reach me on Twitter (@jezcope), Mastodon (@petrichor@scholar.social) or Matrix (@jez:petrichor.me).
You can also now sign up for our mailing list to get the latest news as the community gets up and running!
Personas
Hasan
Hasan heads the cataloguing and acquisitions team in the library of a successful research-focused university. His background is similar to that of many librarians: after graduating with a social science Bachelor’s degree he work a range of jobs for a few years before returning to university for a Masters degree in librarianship. Although he works in the back-office area of librarianship often referred to as “technical services” he doesn’t consider himself technical, as his expertise lies in metadata, finance and supplier negotiation and not programming or data analysis.
However, he recognises that the scope for data science within his team is growing. Several workflows are ripe for full or partial automation, such as matching supplier quotes with requested materials to find the most cost- effective purchasing option; this would speed up the turnaround times while eliminating a potential source of error, freeing his team to spend more time on projects looking to the future. Hasan has attended a number of data science-related courses, including a Library Carpentry bootcamp, which have given him an understanding of what might be possible and what tools could help. He would like to learn more about Python, for example, to create workflows for evaluating the cost-effectiveness of e-book products from different suppliers
He wants a community in which he can learn from other practitioners following the same path and from experts in particular areas, and continue to develop into areas of specialisation that a time-limited course cannot prepare him for. He needs a safe environment to admit limitations to his knowledge and learn without judgement.
Tatiana
Tatiana is a Data Librarian in her HE library, with responsibility for helping researchers at her institution to manage and share their research data and software. She has an undergraduate degree in computer science and some postgraduate research experience, so has a good understanding of what can be done with scripting languages and data science tools.
She is an enthusiastic and experienced teacher and enjoys using passing on her technical knowledge and expertise to others. She also finds learning about the latest tools and techniques satisfying in a way she knows that many of her colleagues do not, and will often winnow what she learns down to key snippets to add to her training sessions, buffering her learners against the fast-moving state of the art while helping them develop their own practice
Tatiana is looking for a community of people who share or can benefit from her enthusiasm, that will provide her with the satisfaction of teaching others and the support to keep learning.