Thank you, PSF and PAFA!

Before the lightning talks start, we'd like to thank the Python Software Foundation and Polly-Alida Farrington of PA Farrington Associates for sponsoring this event. We're able to offer you lunch today because of their generous donations.

Please take some time to learn about how you can get involved with the broader Python community, especially a local user group near you. See how Polly-Alida Farrington can help your library with tech trainings, too.

Lightning talks

We thought you'd like to see some of the ways Python is applied in libraries in the real world. Here you go!

Heidi Frank: Using Python and PyMARC to manipulate MARC record sets

When working with MARC records generated from the Archivists' Toolkit (AT), many edits are needed to have the records fully comply with MARC standards for loading into the local catalog. In addition to using MarcEdit for this process, a Python script that incorporates the PyMARC library is used to make other necessary revisions to the records, add MARC fields for item-level data (i.e., 9XX fields), as well as provide quality control output reports which identify records that lack certain requirements - such as missing dates in the 008 field, records lacking a URL for the finding aid, etc. In this talk, I will walk you through the Python script and the output files it generates, and demonstrate the the power of PyMARC for manipulating and analyzing MARC record sets.

Heidi, Frank. 17 April 2013. "Augmenting the Cataloger’s Bag of Tricks : Using MarcEdit, Python, and PyMARC for Batch-Processing MARC Records Generated From the Archivists’ Toolkit." Code4Lib Journal, Issue 20.

Github repository of the code.

Materials for talk including slides, Python script, and example records.

Roy Tennant: OCLC Research

Although OCLC Research staff use a variety of programming languages, Python routines underlie many of the products of Research, including WorldCat Identities. This brief talk will highlight Python's role in the work of OCLC Research and touch on what makes it the language of choice by at least some Research staff.

Alex Holachek: An Interactive Visualization of the Astrophysics Data System with Python (and a bit of Javascript)

Python enables you to gather, manipulate, and combine your data in new and creative ways. I'll demonstrate how I joined word frequency data from the Astrophysics Data System with word hierarchies from the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus to produce a visualization that lets you interactively explore the popularity of different sub-fields within Astronomy.

Link to the visualization.