Practical Cataloguing Webinar 6: Regular Expressions

Date: Thursday 20th November 2025, 1-2 pm

Presenter:Fran Frenzel

Do you ever wish you had a faster way to clean, transform, or validate messy metadata? Regular expressions (or regex) are powerful text-matching tools that can help you do just that - and they are not as intimidating as they look!

Join us for an accessible introduction to regular expressions, designed specifically for librarians and metadata professionals.

In this session, you’ll learn:-

• What regular expressions are and why they’re useful for library and metadata work-
• How to write simple regex patterns to match, clean, and restructure text-
• Practical examples of regex in action, demonstrated in OpenRefine-
• Tips and resources for continuing your regex learning journey

Whether you’re new to regex or have only dabbled in pattern matching, this session will equip you with practical skills you can immediately apply in your metadata workflows.

Fran Frenzel works as Metadata Analyst in the Metadata Team at LSE Library. Fran's interests are in metadata creation, management and transformations with a specialisation in bulk operations and automated processes, as well as training and career development for metadata professionals. She is an advocate for the acknowledgement of the value and imperative of professional metadata work and high- quality metadata for content discovery and management, and open metadata.

Webinar 6 is free for CILIP members. Non-Members: £5 + VAT

Free for Employer Partner staff - contact your rep or email employerpartners@cilip.org.uk for the discount code.

For further webinars in the series, see: Metadata and Discovery Group Autumn Webinar Series