I’ve been in coding mode for about a week tackling 2 post-it notes that have been put off due to other higher priority things my procrastination.
The first task was to establish an automated process for registering DOIs for a journal we host in the institutional repository. The cons of having a proprietary system is that your vendor will not give anything away when you’re trying to do something they offer as additional service, so pretty much I have to start from scratch. I’m happy that I knocked out this one without too much struggle. I created a DOI generator with Excel VBA. Then I wrote an XSLT stylesheet to transform the OAI XML to CrossRef XML. I can’t remember the last time I hand coded an entire document, it would have been when I worked as a web developer many moons ago, I was a PHP whiz. Time has certainly changed, XML, XSLT and Xpath are so much easier to understand.
The other task I’m currently working on is to export the data from citation databases like Scopus, clean up the data, semi-automate the copyright checking process, and batch load metadata and full text documents into the institutional repository. I followed the logic of the article, Using XSLT and Google Scripts to Streamline Populating an Institutional Repository. I imported the references to EndNote and exported the reference list as XML, the data is very clean, but it lacks affiliation information, which is crucial to us. So I started exploring the Excel export which gives me the “author with affiliation” field as one loooong string… I spent the afternoon trying to figure out how I can populate the spreadsheets properly and pick up all the correct affiliations and search the staff directory for author’s faculty/school/research centre information (which is usually missing from the database export) with minimal human intervention.
Anyway, I’m not going into further details here, most importantly I haven’t figured it out yet 😛 I thought I’d put it out there, I’m just wondering if there’s someone out there doing similar things. In the past few days, I feel a bit isolated, I can’t talk to my colleagues and bounce ideas because nobody here knows how to code. I can contact colleagues from other libraries but I have yet to come across another librarian who codes, I’m sure I’m not the only one trying to do this.
If you are or know of anyone who are coding for your library, perhaps we should connect, have a chat about what we’re working on, what programming languages or tools we know or want to learn. We can also meet regularly to share ideas, learn from each other, and see if there’s opportunity to collaborate?
Even if you don’t know how to code but want to acquire this skill, let’s connect too. I mean, if you can construct the above Boolean search, you already know how to code 😉