The Alma Digital Repository provides many ways to add files, and the documentation in the Developer Network includes examples of how to leverage ingest and deposit capabilities from external apps. In a recent Alma release, the General Configuration API has been enriched with additional fields that make easy work of creating an ingest form. In…

Alma supports the loading of digital materials via CSV files. MD Import profiles can create bibliographic records, representations, and digital files. The workflow involves creating a CSV file in the supported format with metadata and file information, uploading the CSV and digital files to the appropriate folder in S3, and running the MD import process.…

(updated 11/16/2020 with reference to new feature in Dec 2020 Alma release)IntroductionSince the pandemic and pivoting into online learning, digital lending suddenly becomes a hot topic where it was almost never heard of before. Controlled digital lending (CDL) will allow library to legally scan their physical holdings, served the content to its patrons digitally and…

The Global Representation Changes Job offers the option to batch update various representations properties. It is a robust job that uses the Alma jobs infrastructure and allows updating several properties at once. However, in some cases a more customizable approach may be desired. In this post, a basic Python-based tool for updating representation properties via…

Alma recently added support for full text extraction from image files. The resulting text is stored with the file and can be accessed via the file list in the representation resource editor. In addition, the full-text can be searched in the Book Reader viewer. Full-text can be extracted using the “Extract Fulltext” job. In the…

The Alma digital repository has supported video playback via the capabilities of the browser. This means that video files had to be prepared and deposited into the repository in a supported format. In addition, large video files were not always delivered in an optimal resolution dependent on the user's bandwidth.It's now possible to leverage recently…

The digital repository features in Alma continue to be developed. Recently support was added for automatic full text extraction for digital images (OCR), and you can now search for text within one of the built-in viewers. In this blog post, we'll review how to extract text from images in Alma and how that text can be…

Alma's built-in digital viewer can display the wide variety of content supported natively by browsers, including images, movies, audio files, and PDFs. However, the interface and functionality for displaying PDF files varies by browser. In order to better control the user experience, you can implement a custom viewer service for PDF files. For our example,…

Alma's support for the SWORD digital deposit protocol makes it easy to build custom deposit tools for our users. However, no matter straight forward we make our deposit tool, we can't beat the ease of email. To allow users to send files to our repository via email would be the ultimate in usability. We've previously…

In a previous post, we showed how to use the IA Book Reader with digital content managed in Alma. Our example used the BIB and file APIs to retrieve the information necessary to display our content in the viewer. Several recent improvements to Alma allow us to make this flow more efficient. These new features include:…