Whilst at the Open Repositories conference Kim and I were invited by Peter Sefton, University of Western Sydney, to a hackfest* to be held at the Informatics Forum the following week. Hackfests are a great way to meet other developers and learn new technologies in a fun and stimulating environment. This day organised by ContentMine was no different. Our aim for the day was to extract dinosaur facts from open access publications. After an introduction by Peter Murray-Rust, University of Cambridge, we were provided with coffee and set to work.

Peter Murray-Rust explains it all.

We successfully managed to get the quickscrape code installed and working, which is often easier said than done, and then wrote some new scrapers. All of the code is open source and available on GitHub:

Quickscrape platform https://github.com/ContentMine/quickscrape

Journal Scrapers https://github.com/ContentMine/journal-scrapers

Hacking code to discover dinosaur facts.

Thanks to Peter Murray-Rust for inspiration, Peter Sefton for inviting us, CottageLabs for organising, PLOS for lunch, and Kim Shepherd for spending a day of his annual leave coding.

Claire Knowles, Library Digital Development Manager, @cgknowles

* Any event centered around programming and the rapid development of code over many consecutive hours, sometimes days.