RDA/RDF

Alma exposes bibliographic information in RDA/RDF xml format in the following places:

• API
• Publishing
• The job “Export Bibliographic Records”

RDA is WEMI based: Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item. The current Alma RDA implementation exposes Work, Expression and Manifestation.

Manifestation is parallel to the Alma BIB record. Alma groups several BIB record into a single Work based on the bibliographic information.
Note that the work grouping logic is not implemented by default. Institutions that are interested in this functionality should contact ExLibris and ask for it. For institutions that did not ask to implement it, each BIB record will be considered as having its own Work.
Work and Manifestation entities has their own URIs. Each level has links to the other levels – e.g. as part of a Work there are rdaw:manifestationOfWork fields with URIs of all the related manifestations.

2 APIs are available:

• GET manifestation

URL: https://open-na.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/alma/<institution code>/rda/entity/manifestation/<mms id>.rdf
The API returns 3 levels of the information: Work, Expression and Manifestation. Work and manifestation levels has their own URIs.
Sample record

• GET work

URL: https://open-na.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/alma/<institution code>/rda/entity/work/<work id>.rdf
The API returns Work-related fields. In order to know the work id, you should call the GET manifestation API first and retrieve the related Work ID.
Sample record

Alma enables you to publish records to third-party systems in RDA/RDF format. This is done by creating a publishing profile with “RDA/RDF” output format:

This process creates a file containing instance, expression and work information for each BIB record in the set. The file has “RDF” wrapping tag.
The RDA/RDF publishing is currently supported in the “General Publishing Profile” with FTP protocol and also in the job “Export Bibliographic Records”.

For more details regarding the General publishing process, see Alma OLH.