Data Scientist Training for Librarians – re-skilling libraries for the future

I didn't see anything along these lines in the article, but I remember thinking during my undergraduate studies that it would be cool to be able to opt-in to a program that gives a list of people who had checked out the same books (or perhaps the same `n' books) as you. I can't recall the exact title, but there was some relatively specialized book on dynamical systems I often checked out that kept getting recalled. I wondered: who is this person that wants this book and can we go get lunch together?

I guess that there are potential privacy issues here (although perhaps surmountable with an opt-in system) but it still strikes me as worth looking into (either for regular libraries or for sites like Amazon).

When I saw Day 1 was OpenRefine, I figured that was because they didn't want to teach this crowd programming, a perfectly fine decision.

But then they go and teach them Python anyways? If you're gonna do that, why not skip OpenRefine and teach them numpy/scipy/pandas/matplotlib for analysis and visualization?