Electronic Holdings

Alma enables institutions to automatically update electronic holdings from information providers.
Purpose of this functionality is to ease the library management of electronic holdings by automatically activating and updating library specific electronic resources and eliminating any manual interaction in the process.
This is currently supported with ProQuest Ebook Central, Ovid, Springer and Elsevier electronic holdings.

• Upload Electronic Holdings from ProQuest Ebook Central
• Upload Electronic Holdings from Ovid
• Upload Electronic Holdings from Springer
• Upload Electronic Holdings from Elsevier
• Upload Electronic Holdings from Taylor and Francis

To join the list of information providers who enable the automated retrieval of the library specific holdings, the following should be in place:

1. KBART (or alternative format such as csv, txt) files available for the ExLibris Central KnowledgeBase – to create and update, on a regular basis, the Central KnowledgeBase collections.
Note: ExLibris will create dedicated collections for the automated flow, to distinguish them from customer manual activations and to make the transition for existing customers to automated maintenance easier.

2. One holdings file per customer in KBART (or alternative format such as csv, txt) format.
This holdings file should provide a complete list of the customer holdings and be updated regularly.

3. API to allow Alma to automatically retrieve customer holdings file in KBART format per customer
3.1 URL to access the customer holdings file
Format could be , although additional parameters may be added if needed. Note that this is just an example URL:
https://<Provider-hostname_and_path>?format=<KBART2>&apiKey=<SFX-API-KEY>&insttoken=<Institutional Token value issued for the customer>
3.2 API key:
API key for all Alma customers to identify the request is coming from Alma
3.3 Institutional token (insttoken) unique for each customer – to identify the request is for a specific customer. This may be a static or dynamically generated token – as defined by the provider.
Note: an institutional token for ExLibris is needed during development and QA
NOTE: for initial testing purposes, apiKey and insttoken values can be passed through via the URL as indicated above. However, for security reasons, it is recommended to pass these through in the HTTP header instead of via the URL when in this goes into production for customers.
insttoken and APIKey should be submitted using https headers.
The header name/value pairs should be (without [ ] ):
X-PROVIDER-APIKey [APIKey]
X-PROVIDER-Insttoken [insttoken]

4. Contact Ex Libris
To setup the integration please contact Ex Libris Alma Product Management (dana.moshkovits@exlibrisgroup.com)