I've had good luck using both the Data::Faker and Text::Lorem Perl modules to generate large amounts (30k+ rows) of Archivists Toolkit test data. Other ports of Data::Faker would probably work just as well, though it needs a bit more code to more than generate more than name, address and contact info. At the time I was mostly just generating person data for the AT names table but I had considered one day extending the code so that more detailed person data could be created but I never got around to it. It never occurred to me that there might actually be a need for something along the lines of a scholarly NPC generator.
Rick -----Original Message----- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Sean Hannan Sent: Sunday, December 08, 2013 7:00 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Lorem Ipsum metadata? Is there such a thing? In ruby, there's the ffaker gem (https://github.com/EmmanuelOga/ffaker), which itself is a port of Perl's Data::Faker. -Sean ________________________________________ From: Code for Libraries [[email protected]] on behalf of Pottinger, Hardy J. [[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, December 07, 2013 11:51 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [CODE4LIB] Lorem Ipsum metadata? Is there such a thing? Hi, I asked this on Google Plus earlier today, but I figured I'd better take this question here: my brain is trying to tell me that there's a service or app that makes "fake" metadata, kind of like "Lorem Ipsum" but you feed it your fields and it gives you nonsense metadata back. But, it looks right enough for testing. Yesterday, I had to make up about 50 rows of fake metadata to test some code that handles paging in a UI, and I had to make it all up by hand. This hurts my soul. Someone please tell me such a service exists, and link me to it, so I never have to do this again. Or else, I may just make such a service, to save us all. But I don't want to go coding some new service if it already exists, because that sort of thing is for chumps. -- HARDY POTTINGER <[email protected]> University of Missouri Library Systems http://lso.umsystem.edu/~pottingerhj/ https://MOspace.umsystem.edu/ "Making things that are beautiful is real fun." --Lou Reed
