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 <[log in to unmask]> 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" <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: ‎7/‎4/‎2014 4:55 AM
> To: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>
> 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: [log in to unmask]
> Telephone: 0121 288 6936
>