I have been looking through ths hashlib documentation but haven't found anything talking about using salt when hashing data.
Help would be great.
Samir's answer is correct but somewhat cryptic. Basically, the salt is just a randomly derived bit of data that you prefix or postfix your data with to dramatically increase the complexity of a dictionary attack on your hashed value. So given a salt s and data d you'd just do the following to generate a salted hash of the data:
import hashlib
hashlib.sha512( s + d ).hexdigest()
See this wikipedia article for more details