How Granular Do You Want to Go? Analyzing MARCXML Data with Python
Presentation Topic Description
While Alma Analytics can be quite powerful, it has its limits when it comes to providing answers to complex questions about bibliographic and holdings records. For those of us that do work that includes maintaining and enhancing records, having good quality data is vital in making informed decisions on the best way forward. You may find you want to know things like which additional identifiers are present in the record to help with deduplication efforts, or how many records have a particular formatting issue that needs addressing. The data is already there in the record and can be accessed via the Alma Bibs API, provided you know how retrieve and parse it.
In this session, we will discuss how to use the Bibs API with Python and the BeautifulSoup library to build and retrieve custom, granular reports that can be used to assist in data analysis and cleanup projects. While having a basic understanding of Python is helpful for understanding this session, it will be as novice-friendly as possible.