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: [log in to unmask]
Telephone: 0121 288 6936

On 4 Jul 2014, at 15:04, Andrew Weidner <[log in to unmask]> 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 <[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
>>