Great idea for a workshop, Owen.
My staff and I use AutoHotkey every day. We have some apps for data
cleaning in the CONTENTdm Project Client that I presented on recently:
http://scholarcommons.sc.edu/cdmusers/cdmusersMay2014/May2014/13/. I'll be
talking about those in more detail at the Upper Midwest Digital Collections
Conference http://www.wils.org/news-events/wilsevents/umdcc/ if anyone is
interested.
I did an in-house training session for our ILS and database management
folks on a simple AHK app that they now use for repetitive data entry:
https://github.com/metaweidner/AutoType. When I was working with digital
newspapers I developed a suite of tools for making repetitive quality
review tasks easier: https://github.com/drewhop/AutoHotkey/wiki/NDNP_QR
Basic AHK scripts are really great for text wrangling. Just yesterday I
wrote a script to grab some values from a spreadsheet, remove commas from
the numbers, and dump them into a tab delimited file in the format that we
need. That script will become part of our regular workflow. Wrote another
one-off script to transform labels on our wiki into links. It wrapped the
labels in the wiki link syntax, and then I copied and pasted the unique
URLs into the appropriate spots.
It's also useful for keeping things organized. I have a set of scripts that
open up frequently used network drive folders and applications, and I
packaged them as drop down menu choices in a little GUI that's always open
on the desktop. We have a few search scripts that either grab values from a
spreadsheet or input box and then run a search for those terms in a web
database (e.g. id.loc.gov).
You might check out Selenium IDE for working with web forms:
http://docs.seleniumhq.org/projects/ide/. The recording feature makes it
really easy to get started with as an automation tool. I've used it
extensively for automated metadata editing:
http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc86138/m1/1/
Cheers!
Andrew
On Fri, Jul 4, 2014 at 6:54 AM, Riley Childs ri...@tfsgeo.com wrote:
Don't forget AutoIT (auto IT, pretty clever eh?)
http://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit/
Riley Childs
Student
Asst. Head of IT Services
Charlotte United Christian Academy
(704) 497-2086
RileyChilds.net
Sent from my Windows Phone, please excuse mistakes
-Original Message-
From: Owen Stephens o...@ostephens.com
Sent: 7/4/2014 4:55 AM
To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: [CODE4LIB] 'automation' tools
I'm doing a workshop in the UK at a library tech unconference-style event
(Pi and Mash http://piandmash.info) on automating computer based tasks.
I want to cover tools that are usable by non-programmers and that would
work in a typical library environment. The types of tools I'm thinking of
are:
MacroExpress
AutoHotKey
iMacros for Firefox
While I'm hoping workshop attendees will bring ideas about tasks they
would like to automate the type of thing I have in mind are things like:
Filling out a set of standard data on a GUI or Web form (e.g. standard set
of budget codes for an order)
Processing a list of item barcodes from a spreadsheet and doing something
with them on the library system (e.g. change loan status, check for holds)
Similarly for User IDs
Navigating to a web page and doing some task
Clearly some of these tasks would be better automated with appropriate
APIs and scripts, but I want to try to introduce those without programming
skills to some of the concepts and tools and essentially how they can work
around problems themselves to some extent.
What tools do you use for this kind of automation task, and what kind of
tasks do they best deal with?
Thanks,
Owen
Owen Stephens
Owen Stephens Consulting
Web: http://www.ostephens.com
Email: o...@ostephens.com
Telephone: 0121 288 6936
