Preconference Workshops

Half-day workshops will start at 9:00 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., while full-day workshops will run from 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m..

A Static Web Approach to Digital Collections: Hands-On with CollectionBuilder

Looking for an agile, lightweight approach to developing digital collections and scholarship projects? Join us for a hands-on deep dive into CollectionBuilder, an open source project for generating digital collection websites driven by metadata and powered by modern static web technology.

Optimized for non-developers and simple hosting solutions, CollectionBuilder allows... more

Time

9:00am to 12:00pm

Location

The Westin Pittsburgh - Cambria East

Building a full-stack Serverless Web application with React and AWS

Serverless computing allows you to build Web applications without managing or maintaining servers. Using AWS, we can build and deploy responsive applications in the cloud with built-in high availability and flexible scaling capabilities.

In this workshop, we will learn how to build a full-stack serverless Web application using React and... more

Time

1:30pm to 4:30pm

Location

The Westin Pittsburgh - Cambria East

CANCELLED - Accessing web archives with Internet Archive & Archive-It APIs

This workshop will introduce participants to tools for using web archives, with a particular focus on tools to facilitate access to web archives. Using real life use cases, Web Archivists from the Internet Archive will demonstrate Internet Archive and Archive-It APIs and integrations for use in creating access points to... more

Time

1:30pm to 4:30pm

Location

The Westin Pittsburgh - Cambria West

CANCELLED - Solr for Newbies

This is an introductory workshop to Solr, the fast and open source search platform that powers a lot of library products. This workshop is geared to anyone that has never used Solr, or uses it but has not explored some of the features that Solr offers out of the box.

... more

Time

9:00am to 12:00pm

Location

The Westin Pittsburgh - Butler West

Fail4Lib 2020: Hindsight

Everyone experiences failure in their professional lives, but no one likes to talk about it. When we see failure approaching, we distance ourselves, avert our eyes, or – if we’re in its path – brace for the worst. But failure has intrinsic value and is an essential step on the... more

Time

1:30pm to 4:30pm

Location

The Westin Pittsburgh - Somerset East

Get Results with Elastic Search

In this hands-on workshop we will go through the process of building a search app using the Elasticsearch open-source engine. We will cover how to set up Elasticsearch; how to create a local development environment using Docker containers; how to index data from the Library of Congress and how to... more

Time

9:00am to 12:00pm

Location

The Westin Pittsburgh - Somerset East

Introduction to User Experience Design

In this half-day long session, we will be providing practical guidelines and tools to help you effectively plan and incorporate successful user experience design methods. We will provide an overview of the UX design process along with hands-on exercises to practice using the techniques covered. Particular emphasis will be placed... more

Time

9:00am to 12:00pm

Location

The Westin Pittsburgh - Cambria West

Introduction to natural language processing with spaCy - A fast and accessible library that integrates modern machine learning technology

This half-day tutorial will introduce participants to spaCy, a free and open-source library for text analysis. Developed by Matthew Hannibal and Ines Montari in Berlin, spaCy offers a suite of tools for applied natural language processing (NLP) that are fast, practical and allow for quick experimentation and evaluation of language... more

Time

9:00am to 12:00pm

Location

The Westin Pittsburgh - Fayette

Learn to automate with Ansible

Join our DevOps team from Princeton for a one-day, hands-on workshop. You’ll get a comprehensive overview of Ansible and then dive into an overview of creating roles to manage your infrastructure and/or applications. You will be equipped with the skills to take this back to your organization and implement right... more

Time

9:00am to 4:30pm

Location

The Westin Pittsburgh - Butler East

Multi-Site Mania: A Modular Strategy for Creating (and Maintaining) Consistency Across Platforms

Managing a consistent web presence across multiple platforms, technologies, and departments is hard. Once you reach a certain volume, even basic updates between all of your sites becomes a big task, and maintaining a cohesive look/feel and branding can seem out of reach.

In this workshop, I’ll share our strategy... more

Time

1:30pm to 4:30pm

Location

The Westin Pittsburgh - Butler West

Pi-hole Privacy: Tampering is a Good Thing

As digital platforms become increasingly evasive at harvesting user data, libraries have a duty to assist patrons in defending their digital privacy. Members of the Library Freedom Institute will discuss how far industries have overreached in building their online empires of distraction and surveillance with emerging technologies such as facial... more

Time

9:00am to 12:00pm

Location

The Westin Pittsburgh - Somerset West

Practical Privacy And Security For You And Your Library

We all know we should use good passwords, keep our things updated, and follow other basic precautions while online; however, understanding the reasons behind these rules is critical to help us convince ourselves and others that the extra work is indeed worth it. This session will cover securing you &... more

Time

1:30pm to 4:30pm

Location

The Westin Pittsburgh - Somerset West

Using & hacking the Distant Reader

The Distant Reader is a high performance computing system which takes an arbitrary amount of unstructured data (text) as input, and outputs sets of structured data for analysis. Put another way, the Reader consumes just about any number of files in any just about any format, and it outputs plain... more

Time

1:30pm to 4:30pm

Location

The Westin Pittsburgh - Fayette