by The Evergreen Outreach Committee is pleased to announce that December’s Contributor of the Month is Jane Sandberg, who serves as the Electronic Resources Librarian for Linn-Benton Community College.
Jane has been involved with Evergreen since 2013 and has been active in many areas of the community over the years. Jane has contributed both code and documentation in Evergreen, and she is on the all-time Author list in Evergreen’s git repository with 224 commits to her name at press time. Jane is also very active in Launchpad with an impressive 148 bugs filed and 191 bugs commented upon.
Jane has recently taken primary responsibility for creating the release notes that accompany every Evergreen release. This is a big job, but Jane remarks, “It’s a really exciting project to work with the build team and be one of the first people to see what the next build looks like.” She notes that she enjoys the challenge of translating ‘developer-speak’ into a summary that will get people excited about new features.
In addition to her work with creating code and documentation, Jane is very active in DIG (Documentation Interest Group) and the Cataloging Working Group. She also founded and leads the Student Success Working Group which focuses on connecting academic libraries in the Evergreen community.
Jane’s work at a community college informs a lot of her interactions with Evergreen. “Community college’s goal is to teach and that embeds itself in everything we do. How can the OPAC be a tool for teaching information literacy?” she asks. “Can contributing to code be a path for our comp sci students to learn? Learning seeps into every aspect, and it’s definitely a different lens.”
Jane has also been focusing on ways to improve accessibility in the Evergreen OPAC and staff client. Her goal is to “contribute knowledge and code and best practices” relating to accessibility. “It’s something that I think our community needs to think about and learn about a little more.”
Jane’s advice for new community members is to take a cue from Wikipedia. “Wikipedia’s editing motto is ‘be bold’. It’s natural to look at a huge project like Evergreen and assume these people have been doing this for years and have it all figured out… . Just give it a try and be willing to keep at it: be bold, and stay engaged afterwards.”
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Do you know someone in the community who deserves a bit of extra recognition? Please use this form to submit your nominations. We ask for your email in case we have any questions, but all nominations will be kept confidential.
Any questions can be directed to Andrea Buntz Neiman via abneiman@equinoxinitiative.org or abneiman in IRC.