Ada Lovelace Day, during which I call out some folk for awesomeness

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a celebration of the work and achievements of women in science, technology, engineering, and math.

And library technology, whose place in STEM is not to be denied.

Here are a few (and I should emphasize that this is a very incomplete list) of the women I have had the privilege to collaborate with and learn from:

• Ruth Bavousett: Ruth is a Perl monger, contributor of many patches to Koha, has served as Koha’s translation manager, and is an author for opensource.com.
• Katrin Fischer: Katrin has contributed over 500 patches to Koha and has served many terms as Koha’s quality assurance manager. QA Manager is not an easy position to occupy, and never comes with enough thanks, but Katrin has succeeded at it. Thanks, Katrin!
• Christina Harlow (@cm_harlow): Christina walks the boundary between library metadata and library software and bridges it. In her blog’s title, she gives herself the sobriquet of “metadata lackey” — but to me that seems far too modest. She’s been instrumental in the revival of Mashcat this year.
• Kathy Lussier: Kathy has contributed both code and documentation to the Evergreen project and has served in many roles on the project, including on its oversight board and its web team. She has spearheaded various initiatives to make the Evergreen project more inclusive and is a strong advocate for universal, accesible design.

Although she is no longer with us, Henriette Avram, the creator of the MARC format, deserves a callout today as well: it is not every programmer who ships, and moreover, ships something that remains in use 50 years later. I am sure that Avram, were she still alive and working, would be heavily involved in libraries’ efforts to adopt Linked Open Data.

Ada Lovelace Day, during which I call out some folk for awesomeness by Galen Charlton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.