Does Free Code Camp cover any/all of the following XML, XSLT, XQuery, RDF, RDFa, Structured Data Vocabularies, Linked Data. SPARQL?

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Does Free Code Camp cover any/all of the following XML, XSLT, XQuery, RDF, RDFa, Structured Data Vocabularies, Linked Data, SPARQL?

I know about some courses in XML and RDF based systems and it’s relevant to my career as a librarian, but it’s not something I’m required to learn or something I need at the moment, but I’d like to not wait until it’s needed and miss an opportunity for advancement.

I’m slowly working through the Free Code Camp curriculum and really thankful for the opportunity it provides. However, at the end of the day I’m a librarian and love what I do, I’m bad at math and not great at coding stuff, but I graduated with an MLIS with a 4.0 GPA and want to get a dual PhD in Religion and Information Science. But at the end of all that, I would still consider myself just a librarian. So I don’t really need to know how to code, but there are lots of reasons that any coding knowledge would be useful. I took a metadata course as an elective for my MLIS and found that interesting even if parts of the course were over my head.

I never got the chance to formally take a cataloging course so I am also currently working through the Certificate in Cataloging and Technical Services offered by Library Juice Academy (LJA) which offers a lot of amazing courses. I’m taking a couple years post-MLIS to fill any gaps in my library science skills, develop some level of coding knowledge (as well as improve my Ukrainian) before I go for a masters in theology focusing on church history and then the PhD.

You can find the XML and RDF certificate on the LJA website. We can’t post links to them here or I would… Is it something that would complement what I’m learning here or is it just superfluous in my case? Like I said, LJA is a great resource if anyone is interested. I’m working on one certificate not to mention I want to take a GIS course through them, but is the XML and RDF certificate going to teach me considerably more than I will learn here at Free Code Camp?

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I strongly recommend only ever getting a PhD if you want to do academic research as a job.

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That’s true. I do want to do research, but not really teach mostly work as a librarian/researcher rather than the usual role as a professor who works as a teacher/researcher. Of course, I’m sure I will teach at least sometimes whether it’s teaching freshmen how to use the library or teaching a core class or something within my specialty. I have an M.Ed. and taught a few years, but never felt comfortable as a teacher, but love being a librarian although I’m not big on the programming part of librarianship. I love helping other staff and librarians out with their programs, but prefer not to be in a front of the room position if at all possible. I still volunteer time to teach ESL and put myself out there, but I prefer to work with people over the long run and have an ongoing project or short term interactions like I handle as a librarian. Someone has an information need and I help them find what they need or even help them figure out what they need. If there is any way to serve as a doctoral advisor as an academic librarian instead of as a professor that would be great. I haven’t found any examples of this, but I’ve proposed the idea in the past that academic librarians especially with tenure who hold PhDs in a field and perform research should be able to serve as doctoral advisors if the student’s research interests fit best with the librarian’s area of expertise.

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Your doctoral advisor needs to be on faculty at an institution that gives PhDs. You can have additional individuals with PhDs on your committee though.

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“considerably more” would be relative to what you want to get out of the course. Knowledge is knowledge, but relevant knowledge is subjective to what your goals are. It sounds like you’d gain more from this GIS course, but I’m not 100% sure. More generally the overlap between web development and library categorization systems isn’t much AFAIK.

The overlap would be using web technologies to implement a domain specific application, such as library categorization software. If you aren’t doing that, there probably isn’t much if any overlap besides whatever common standards are used in both spaces (such as XML).

I don’t believe so. FreeCodeCamp primarily focuses on web development, with the MERN stack.

As a web-dev myself, I’m not familiar with any of these technologies except XML. XML being a data-transfer format being popular a decade plus ago, which has fallen out of favor due to the rise of JSON (another data transfer format).

Because of that, I looked up a few of the things you mentioned to see if I could understand them more and found something worth providing. “Semantic web” is dead, and if RDF is the syntax for it, it might not be a “relevant” skill outside of a few niche cases. (ref, ref)

This might explain why I’ve never heard about it, it isn’t as relevant to modern web development. Where most of the “dreams of semantic web” just don’t apply due to the original goals not being prioritized.

Modern web development focuses almost entirely on 2 notions:

  1. SEO - search-engine-optimization - to get your site Infront of users looking for stuff so you can sell stuff either directly or indirectly.
  2. The web as an application delivery platform - to get your software to users via the web, so you can sell stuff either directly or indirectly

Both of these are driven entirely by $, and based around the fact the web is everywhere. Because of this I assume is why semantic web fell out of favor, it might be important from an academic standpoint, but it doesn’t pay the bills.

Again I could be wrong, but I can say freeCodeCamp doesn’t focus on this stuff.

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This is all excellent advice from everyone. I think I will finish up the Cataloging and Technical Services Certificate through Library Juice Academy as that is relevant to my career. I’ll hold off on the XML and RDF Based Systems Certificate. If I need to learn that stuff at some point I’ll do that, but it doesn’t sound necessary as a general rule. I’ll keep working on the Free Code Camp curriculum although at the end of the day I’m not sure how much actual coding I will ever do, but it’s free and I think it’s a good thing to learn even if I forget most of it because I don’t need it. Chances are all I need to know is a little HTML, CSS, a bit of JavaScript and some Python command lines. I can make my own website for my research projects, make them interactive and easy for others to add data and then I am mostly using data analysis software (qualitative and quantitative), social network analysis software, and geographic information system software to do research so maybe knowing a little code would speed up certain processes, but hardly a coder.