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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 >