The European Astronomical Society (EAS) European Week of Astronomy and Space Science (EWASS) meeting, held June 26-30 in Prague, had its first Hack Together Day, coordinated by Abigail Stevens (U Amsterdam), Amruta Jaodand (ASTRON), and Matteo Bachetti (INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Cagliari).

The projects were varied and some participants worked on more than one. I proposed two ASCL-related projects for this, both of which had willing participants. Daniel Evans (Keele U) worked on creating a dataset of keywords for ASCL entries based on their associated papers, and Jessica Kirkby-Kent (Keele U), Eleonora Alei (INAF – Astronomical Observatory of Padua) and I worked on finding preferred citation information for codes that didn’t have it. Since we were working from an open Google spreadsheet, the link to the spreadsheet was tweeted out several times during the Hack Together Day and later, allowing others not at EWASS to participate in this Hack Together Day project that day and in subsequent days, to good effect.

Kirkby-Kent, Alei, and I looked for preferred citation info for at least 184 codes and found this information for 45 codes, so we have a yield of 24.5% — we found citation information on 24.5% of the code sites we looked at. Another two codes had citation information added to them by unknown users during the Hack event, and later, citation information was added for several more codes. I spent last weekend with the data Kirkby-Kent, Alei, mostly anonymous others, and I gathered and adding the collected preferred citations to ASCL entries, editing a total of 52 entries to add this important information. I still have a bit of information to go through and get clarification on, and will soon add that, too, and then will go back through the Google spreadsheet again, as I see someone — I suspect Kirkby-Kent! — has been methodically adding more information. (Thank you!!)

Evans continued to build the dataset after EWASS and found a few bibcode anomalies along the way, which I’ll share with ADS at a later time. He has sent me email to let me know his searching is complete and he is getting the results into reasonable shape so this information can be added to the ASCL, too. Having this information will be very useful to anyone who uses the ASCL to find software. (Thank you!!)

I am so glad I participated in the Hack Together Day, and am grateful to Evans, Kirkby-Kent,  Alei, and all others who gathered information for the ASCL, and to Jaodand, Stevens, and Bachetti for planning it. Thank you!