General Publishing
Alma maintains an increasingly versatile, generic publishing model to be used for integrating Alma with third-party systems. This model provides:
- The ability to incrementally publish data through files or OAI-PMH
- Optional enrichment of inventory-related data
- The ability to perform normalization (reformatting) of the published data
The Alma general publishing module should be used in order to integrate with third-party systems, based on the bibliographic information stored in Alma.
The following third-party systems has a specific profile which should be used instead of the general publishing:
The following table summarize the publishing options:
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Run full publishing | It is possible to publish all records, replacing previously published data. If this option is not selected, Alma publishes records that have changed since the last time they were published. This includes bibliographic records that were added, updated, deleted, and linked to inventory records that changed. |
| Scheduling | Daily, Weekly, Monthly |
| Email Notifications | It is possible to define email addresses that will receive email notifications when publishing job has completed. Notification might be send for successful jobs and/or jobs that contain errors. |
| Content | Publishing can be done in: *Bibliographic level (standard) – one bibliographic record is published containing all holdings, portfolio, and item information. *Holdings/portfolio level – one bibliographic record is published for each unique holdings or portfolio associated with the bibliographic record. If one bibliographic record is associated with multiple holdings or portfolios, the bibliographic record is published multiple times. *Item/portfolio level – one bibliographic record is published for each unique item or portfolio associated with the bibliographic record. If one bibliographic record is associated with multiple portfolios or items, the bibliographic record is published multiple times. Note that you can configure the datafield in which holding/item/portfolio information will be published. |
| Publishing protocols | FTP, OAI, Z39.50 |
| Output formats | MARC 21 Bibliographic UNIMARC KORMARC Dublin Core (Simple) Dublin Core (Qualified) MODS BIBFRAME Bibliographic RDA/RDF |
The Format of Published Data
Records are published in XML format, according to the OAI-PMH.xsd.
Data Enrichment
The bibliographic record retrieved from Alma is enriched with additional identifiers. The MMS ID of the Network Zone and the Alma Community Zone ID are added to the record in additional 035 marc fields. The Community Zone ID is added with the prefix (EXLCZ) while the Network Zone ID is added with the prefix (EXLNZ-network_code). The local MMS ID is in the 001 marc field. These additional shared IDs can be used for better identification of a common record. The local MMS ID should be used when there is a need to call an API in the institution for the record.
