A grad school classmate of mine, Dianne Dietrich, has created an excellent set of tutorials for librarians who want to learn how to use command line. Here’s why:

If you’re a librarian, and you’re working with lots of information — and I mean, lots, like information overload lots — you need to be equipped with a way to handle this information without resorting to mind-numbing data entry methods. No, really. Every time someone says, “I guess I have to do this exhaustingly repetitive task by hand, I cry a little. It doesn’t matter if you’re one thousand miles away; I know, and I weep.

The tutorials are funny, easy to understand, and created especially for librarians (the examples use the LC Classification Outline!). I’ve been having a great time working my way through them, discovering some of the ways that command line can make my life easier, and it’s just too terrific a resource not to share. If you ever wanted to learn how to use the command line but weren’t sure where to start, look no further.