Geek Out: Adding Coding Skills to Your Professional Repertoire

Programming skills are crucial and often essential in making today's library systems and services more efficient and user-friendly. Librarians can use these tools to change the way information resources are currently served to make them more efficient by creating new library services. These skills, however, are often not included in LIS curricula, and it can be difficult to know where to begin. This paper offers some effective strategies to obtain coding skills, covers several common mistakes and obstacles that librarians make and encounter while trying to learn how to program in the library environment, and offers helpful tips and resources. It aims to provide librarians with a good place to start in obtaining these programming skills and explains why they are useful skills to acquire.