NYPL Digital Collections API demo

Sean Crowe, Carolyn Hansen - UC Libraries

Scope and Purpose

We're going to go through the basic concepts of Python programming, using the script built upon example code from NYPL, to extract some key bibliographic data from the NYPL Collections API. We'll see how to apply this script to current data and how to modify it to access other data points.

Setup

We'll be using Python 3

For Windows, Mac, and Linux, download from Python.org/downloads and make sure to check add to path option on install.
Once python3 is installed, install the requets module with pip pip3 install requests

Test

With text editor, open a file and type print('hello world') and save it in your home directory as hello.py
In the windows command prompt (cmd.exe) or Mac terminal, cd to your home directory and type python3 hello.py You should see the output of the program.

NYPL API token

Get token here. Also make note of your username and password for api calls from the web browser.

Concepts

Types

Strings

Strings are immutable

length

len("Let's find the length of this string")
#>> 36

concatenate

"Hello " + "World"
#>> "Hello World"

indexes

"Let's find a substring!".find("sub")
#>> 13

regular expressions

re.sub("a", "b", "I'm replacing all my a's with b's")
#>> "I'm replacing all my b's with b's"

interpolation

page_number = '4'
print "Please turn to page {0}".format(page_number)
#>>> Please turn to page 4

Integers

1 + 1
#>>> 2

range

list(range(10)
#>>>  [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

Lists

['red', 'blue', 'green', 2]

Dictionaries

{ key : value }

Variables

assigning

my_variable = "some string"
#>> "some string"

File I/O

readers & writers

Loops

with Common method of setting things up for run time and closing out when job is finished
for

matches = ['a', 'b', 'c']
for match in matches:
  print(match)
#>>> 
a
b
c

Functions

passing variables to functions as parameters
return value

def chop(i):
  for letter in i:
    print(letter)
  return 'yeah!'
var = 'heck'
chop(var)
#>>
h
e
c
k
"yeah!"

Modules

csv
requests
xmltree

crowesn/nypl_api_demo