Thanks Riley and Andrew for these pointers - some great stuff in there Other tools and examples still very welcome :)
Owen Owen Stephens Owen Stephens Consulting Web: http://www.ostephens.com Email: o...@ostephens.com Telephone: 0121 288 6936 On 4 Jul 2014, at 15:04, Andrew Weidner <metaweid...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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 >>