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2017 Annual Meeting

May 9–12, 2017

Schaumburg, Illinois

Bridging the gaps: Python scripting around Alma's edges

Friday, May 12, 2017 at 10:00 AM–10:45 AM CDT
Euphoria
Product or Program Track
General/ Strategic--Not Product Specific
Alma
Session Description

Want to learn to code but not sure where to start? In the 2015 report “Coding for Librarians: Learning by Example," Andromeda Yelton advised “learning how to make one language do a few useful things." Case studies of librarians who learned to code for a specific need abound. But how to identify your own coding use case? In this presentation, I will discuss how I made the leap to writing useful scripts for everyday work through projects involving extraction, transformation, and import of Alma metadata. Familiar tools provided most pieces of the puzzle; coding helped "bridge the gaps" by reducing/eliminating manual work. I will describe 4 simple projects: parsing a file of vendor-supplied MARC records; creating item records from spreadsheet input; creating a list of course-assigned ebook titles and URLS; and evaluating OCLC reclamation project unresolved records. Participants will leave this session with ideas for how to start small and progressively expand their coding skills.

Presenters

Stacie Traill, University of Minnesota
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