Contest of Champions: Headless Battle

Abstract

Presentation from the annual Access Conference (Sept 8-10 2015, Toronto). From the published schedule: A URL checker can tell you about a 404 or a redirect, but what happens when your e-resources are telling your users they don’t have access when they should?

Frustration, confusion, disappointment . . .

Librarians too are left wondering, what other things are broken, and how do we find them?

This summer at VIU we’re working with screen scrapers in our very own “Contest of Champions” by benchmarking tools in jruby, ruby, and python that drive headless browsers to identify possible access problems with our eResources. In this session we’ll recap the trials and victories of our champions and consider the future applications of the winner.

Virtual gladiators vying for glory! Headless battles! Libraries don’t get more exciting than this!