Tag Archives: library

Scraping, scripting, hacking

I just finished my talk at Mashed Library 2009 – an event for librarians wanting to mash and mix their data. My talk was almost definitely a bit overwhelming, judging by the backchannel, so I thought I’d bang out a quick blog post to try and help those I managed to confuse.

My talk was entitled “Scraping, Scripting and Hacking your way to API-less data”, and intended to give a high-level overview of some of the techniques that can be used to “get at data” on the web when the “nice” options of feeds and API’s aren’t available to you.

The context of the talk was this: almost everything we’re talking about with regard to mashups, visualisations and so on relies on data being available to us. In the cutting edge of Web2 apps, everything has got an API, a feed, a developer community. In the world of museums, libraries and government, this just isn’t the case. Data is usually held on-page as html (xhtml if we’re lucky), and programmatic access is nowhere to be found. If we want to use that data, we need to find other ways to get at it.

My slides are here:

[slideshare id=1690990&doc=scrapingscriptinghacking-090707060418-phpapp02]

A few people asked that I provide the URLs I mentioned together with a bit of context. Many of the slides above have links to examples, but here’s a simple list for those who’d prefer that:

Phew. Now I can see why it was slightly overwhelming 🙂