Learner Profiles

Anna works in the open access team of a university library. Every year she reports the article processing charges her institution paid to OpenAPC, and she compiles the numbers for internal reports in Excel. Learning to load, filter and plot APC data with pandas will let her answer questions like “How much did we pay per publisher?” in a few lines of code instead of an afternoon of copy-pasting.

Jonas is a research data management consultant at a university. He helps researchers publish their datasets in repositories such as Zenodo and regularly needs to check the metadata of many DOIs at once, e.g. to see whether creators and affiliations are complete. Retrieving metadata from the DataCite API with Python will save him from looking up each DOI by hand.

The skills learned in this lesson should also be relevant for the following kinds of learners:

Ling advises university faculty and students on data management, but doesn’t write code herself. Mastering Python basics like lists, dictionaries, and built-in help will allow her to read her researchers’ scripts with confidence and run quick exploratory checks on repository datasets.

Mateo works with digital collection metadata and knows XML inside out, but spreadsheets are no longer cutting it for his huge batch cleanup jobs. Building a foundation in Python and in working with web APIs will give him the leverage he needs for heavy data wrangling.