I've been working off and on with Jane Jacobs at Queens Public Library in New York City to help them with some data munging. QPL has lots of patrons who speak Russian, and a large collection of Russian materials. Unfortunately their catalog data has transliterated titles, authors, subjects etc. This means the original Cyrillic has been romanized so that cards (and more recently records in a database) can be sorted and displayed. Now that there's Unicode, these Cyrillic characters can be sorted and displayed pretty easily. So I used Perl with MARC::Record to detransliterate their data, which was then imported back into their online catalog. Now patrons who read Russian can search for and read bibliographic records for Russian titles in Russian. It's kind of neat to see your name in the news, even if it is just a tiny blip in the days events. I just wish they mentioned Perl in the press release :)
Nice job!
I'm always interested in "real-world" applications for perl and CPAN modules. Not that i need any proof that perl and CPAN are useful -- but, it's nice to have examples which aren't from the programmers' point of view.
I like being able to point out how perl has helped in situations where the user has no idea that perl is being used.
