[CODE4LIB] Investigating library technology selection processes

[Thomas Guignard]

Dear code4libbers

I am currently working towards a Master of Information Studies at
Aberystwyth University. As part of my course, *I am undertaking a research
project that explores how technology solutions in libraries are selected*.

I am now gathering examples of projects involving technology in libraries,
and I can't think of a better place to look than the code4lib community.

*If you have 15 minutes to spare*, I would be very grateful if you could
fill out this *short online questionnaire *:
https://aber.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/library-tech-selection

*If you have more than 15 minutes*, I am also looking for *examples of
projects that went particularly well, or particularly badly.* If you have
been involved in such a project and would be ready to spend about 45
minutes telling me more about it, I would love to hear from you!

Thank you in advance for your help, and I welcome any comments or feedback
on my research topic or the questionnaire (or the meaning of life)...

Regards,

Thomas Guignard

Re: [CODE4LIB] Sorry for my last message

[Thomas Guignard]

Ivan, if you are being held and forced to type emails against your will,
send us a unicorn emoji.

On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 5:10 AM, "Iván V.G."  wrote:

> It was a mistake.
>

Re: [CODE4LIB] Amazon Extension for OpenRefine?

[Thomas Guignard]

Hi again

I played around with the ISBNdb OpenRefine queries to extract the minimum
price from their database. I had to parse the returned JSON code to do
this. In case you are interested, I've published these operations here:
https://gist.github.com/timtomch/34bc2c4c9666cf9bf011

They can be applied to your project by using OpenRefine's "Replaying
Operations" function:
https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/wiki/History#replaying-operations

Have fun, and let me know if you're having any issues.
Thomas

On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 2:36 PM, Thomas Guignard 
wrote:

> Hi Lisa
>
> One thing that comes to mind would be for you to query a book price API
> from OpenRefine using the "Add column by fetching URLs" function:
> https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/wiki/Fetching-URLs-From-Web-Services
>
> Querying the Amazon database has become quite a complex affair nowadays.
> You might have better luck with the ISBNdb:
> http://isbndb.com/api/v2/docs/prices
>
> Getting a free key is a matter of seconds, and you can then query their
> service using the ISBN directly. The OpenRefine tutorial cited above should
> help you parse the JSON returned by the ISBNdb API call to extract only the
> price information. A free key only grants you 500 queries per day, so you
> may want to parse your list into smaller chunks. Or get a paid key.
> ISBNdb aggregates information from different sources, so you might need to
> decide what to do with the different prices you get: take the minimum, or
> an average, etc.
>
> However, ISBNdb's database may be less extensive than Amazon's. If you
> want to query Amazon, I'm not sure what the GitHub script you are referring
> to does, but my understanding is that it acts as a wrapper around Amazon's
> native API and reformats its output. Since this code is 5 years old, there
> are chances the API has changed since then, but you can try. You might have
> better luck querying Amazon's Product Advertising API directly, e.g. with
> https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/latest/DG/ItemLookup.html
>
> Good luck!
> Thomas
>
> On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 11:25 AM, Lisa McColl  wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> We have a large spreadsheet of titles/isbns etc that lists books from our
>> collection that are missing. To help our selectors decide whether or not
>> they want to replace the books, we would like to add a price column to the
>> spreadsheet.
>>
>> There is an Amazon "price check" script on GitHub (
>> https://github.com/JohnKimDev/Amazon-Price-Check) but I was wondering if
>> anyone knows of an extension that enables OpenRefine with Amazon. It seems
>> it would work well for our needs.
>>
>> Thank you.
>> --
>> *Lisa McColl*
>> *Cataloging/Metadata Librarian*
>> *Lehigh University*
>> *610-758-2639*
>>
>
>

Re: [CODE4LIB] Amazon Extension for OpenRefine?

[Thomas Guignard]

Hi Lisa

One thing that comes to mind would be for you to query a book price API
from OpenRefine using the "Add column by fetching URLs" function:
https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/wiki/Fetching-URLs-From-Web-Services

Querying the Amazon database has become quite a complex affair nowadays.
You might have better luck with the ISBNdb:
http://isbndb.com/api/v2/docs/prices

Getting a free key is a matter of seconds, and you can then query their
service using the ISBN directly. The OpenRefine tutorial cited above should
help you parse the JSON returned by the ISBNdb API call to extract only the
price information. A free key only grants you 500 queries per day, so you
may want to parse your list into smaller chunks. Or get a paid key.
ISBNdb aggregates information from different sources, so you might need to
decide what to do with the different prices you get: take the minimum, or
an average, etc.

However, ISBNdb's database may be less extensive than Amazon's. If you want
to query Amazon, I'm not sure what the GitHub script you are referring to
does, but my understanding is that it acts as a wrapper around Amazon's
native API and reformats its output. Since this code is 5 years old, there
are chances the API has changed since then, but you can try. You might have
better luck querying Amazon's Product Advertising API directly, e.g. with
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/latest/DG/ItemLookup.html

Good luck!
Thomas

On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 11:25 AM, Lisa McColl  wrote:

> Hello,
>
> We have a large spreadsheet of titles/isbns etc that lists books from our
> collection that are missing. To help our selectors decide whether or not
> they want to replace the books, we would like to add a price column to the
> spreadsheet.
>
> There is an Amazon "price check" script on GitHub (
> https://github.com/JohnKimDev/Amazon-Price-Check) but I was wondering if
> anyone knows of an extension that enables OpenRefine with Amazon. It seems
> it would work well for our needs.
>
> Thank you.
> --
> *Lisa McColl*
> *Cataloging/Metadata Librarian*
> *Lehigh University*
> *610-758-2639*
>

[CODE4LIB] Tutorial for e-resources usage stats analysis using R and/or python

[Thomas Guignard]

Hello libcoders

Is anyone aware of a nice tutorial to get started on how to analyse COUNTER
reports using either R or Python?

As far as Python is concerned, I know of the pycounter library [1], but I
was wondering if there were some publicly available examples of it being
used in action that could be useful for beginners.

Thanks for your help.

Best,
Thomas

[1] https://github.com/pitthsls/pycounter

Re: [CODE4LIB] Protagonists

[Thomas Guignard]

The LibraryThing API could also be used to retrieve what they call "Common
Knowledge" tags, including character names but also place names etc.

Example:
https://www.librarything.com/services/rest/1.1/?method=librarything.ck.getwork&id=2773690&apikey=d231aa37c9b4f5d304a60a3d0ad1dad4
(using the example API key)
Look for the "characternames" field.

As far as I can tell, however, there is no way to determine which of the
characters are the "lead male" and "lead female" character short of
assuming that the top listed characters are in effect the lead ones. Also,
the API calls are limited to 1000 a day. But maybe an avenue to consider.

t.

On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 2:15 PM, Shaun Ellis  wrote:

> Another interesting startup in this area is Trajectory.
>
> Here's a list of Classics/Fiction via their JSON API (doc=isbn):
> http://api.trajectory.com/api/v1/search/?q=&c=Fiction%20%2F%
> 20Classics&limit=568
>
> Here's a "human readable" view:
> http://www.trajectory.com/search/?q=&facets&c=Fiction%
> 20%2F%20Classics&limit=568
>
> -Shaun
>
>
> On 4/14/15 11:07 AM, Amanda French wrote:
>
>> What you *did* need for this interesting project was Small Demons, which
>> was a for-profit company that was creating linked data from books -- here's
>> an article about it: http://www.theverge.com/2013/
>> 3/1/4043298/building-an-atlas-for-books-with-small-demons
>>
>> But it shut down in 2013, and I have no idea what happened to the data.
>> It might all have been commercial and proprietary, anyway. Article on its
>> closure: http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-small-
>> demons-to-close-unless-buyer-appears-20131106-story.html
>>
>> Amanda
>>
>>
>> On 4/13/15 10:12 PM, davesgonechina wrote:
>>
>>> So I have this idea I'd like to do for a hobby project, but it requires
>>> finding a table that lists a classic novel, a Gutenberg.org link to an
>>>
>>>  
>>
>>

[CODE4LIB] Programming & data analysis workshop at the University of Toronto iSchool - Feb 5-6

[Thomas Guignard]

Hi everyone

The Association for Information Systems student chapter at the University
of Toronto is organizing a two-day workshop on data analysis on February
5-6, 2015:
http://swcarpentry.github.io/2015-02-05-toronto/

Using the tried and true Software Carpentry bootcamp format [1], the
workshop aims to teach participants basic skills to get started with data
analysis:
- programming with R
- regular expressions
- open data harvesting, analysis and publishing

The workshop is primarily geared towards iSchool students and librarians
but is open to all! And almost free :)

Cheers,
Thomas

[1] http://software-carpentry.org/workshops/index.html

Re: [CODE4LIB] jobs digest for 2014-05-16

[Thomas Guignard]

+1

But I guess it's hard to keep everyone happy...


On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 12:34 PM, Brian Kennison  wrote:

> On May 21, 2014, at 9:43 AM, Edward M. Corrado  > wrote:
>
> I am a fan of the full ads as well.
>
> +1
>

Re: [CODE4LIB] online book price comparison websites?

[Thomas Guignard]

Hi everyone

Thanks for raising this question and for the interesting responses. Any
good sources for doing the same with e-books? Not merely mass-market
e-books (some can be found via addall and the like, see also this thread
for more hints
http://ebooks.stackexchange.com/questions/891/are-there-any-ebook-search-engines),
but library e-books such as available on ebrary, myIlibrary and the like?

Vendors of these platforms all seem to have come to the bizarre conclusion
than defining new, platform-specific, ISBNs for these titles was a good
idea. The (intended?) result is that title-matching and price comparison is
frustratingly difficult. In my experience, ISBN APIs such as the ones
discussed here http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/8715 often don't
recognize "eISBNs".

Any ideas?

Thomas


On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 6:55 PM, Joe Hourcle
wrote:

> On Feb 26, 2014, at 3:14 PM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
>
> > Anyone have any recommendations of online sites that compare online
> prices for purchasing books?
> >
> > I'm looking for recommendations of sites you've actually used and been
> happy with.
> >
> > They need to be searchable by ISBN.
> >
> > Bonus is if they have good clean graphic design.
> >
> > Extra bonus is if they manage to include shipping prices in their price
> comparisons.
>
>
> Might be too late, but :
>
> http://isbn.nu/
>
> It doesn't include the shipping prices in their results, though.
>
> API is just appending the ISBN to the end, either 9 or 13 :
>
> http://isbn.nu/0060853980
> http://isbn.nu/9780060853983
>
> -Joe
>