Unlikely Allies of Textbook Affordability: Python, Bookstore Data, and a Discovery API
Textbooks cost too much, so our library decided to publish a webpage listing all available course books in our entire collection (not only course reserves). Our systems are old and could not parse an ISBN passed through a URL. Manually reviewing bookstore data with thousands of manual searches in our discovery layer was super inefficient, and bulk search operations output was less than useful too. I share and demo an open source script I wrote using Python and the EBSCO Discovery System API to automate the semesterly process, saving about 15 hours of staff time.
