About

Our workshops

ZB MED – Information Centre for Life Sciences has been offering hands-on workshops on programming and data skills since 2018. They are taught by the Data Science and Services team in Cologne and are explicitly designed for people with little or no prior experience.

Our main audience are researchers, doctoral candidates and students in medicine, health sciences and biomedical research. We also train staff in academic and public libraries and in research and infrastructure institutions.

Our core offering is the two-day Library Carpentry workshop covering the Unix Shell, Python and Git, in German or English. Other formats range from half-day modules to two-day workshops, and topics can be combined to suit your needs.

Book a workshop

Institutions can book our workshops for their staff. Most of them take place online; on-site workshops are possible on request. If you are interested, please contact us at muellerr@zbmed.de.

More about our training offer on the ZB MED website: Programmieren und Datenkompetenz (German) · Programming and data skills (English). To stay informed about new workshops, subscribe to our newsletter Training @ ZB MED.

The Carpentries

Many of our lessons are adapted from lessons of The Carpentries (Library Carpentry, Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry), an international non-profit community that develops openly licensed workshops on coding and data skills. Typical for the Carpentries approach is live coding: instructors write code step by step and participants follow along on their own computers. Mistakes are part of it and are solved together.

Several colleagues at ZB MED are certified Carpentries Instructors and Instructor Trainers and are active in the German-speaking Carpentries community. We also contribute to AI Carpentry, the new Carpentries lessons on the reflective use of AI in research.

Our adaptations are not official lessons of The Carpentries and are not endorsed by them. Each lesson credits its original authors.

Open source

All lessons and this website are hosted on Codeberg and built automatically with Woodpecker CI. Suggestions and corrections are welcome as issues in the respective repository.