How to use a MARC Enrichment Service with Alma
- Pulling records from Alma to send for enrichment.
- Create and run an Alma Analytics report (see screen shot at end) to identify all bib records created since the last enrichment. Limit your query to the following parameters:
Bib not suppressed
Bib lifecycle is In Repository
Locations: You may or may not want to limit the results to certain locations. I have limited to include most of our print book locations, no online or media or gov doc titles. (The TOCs are already easily accessible for our ebooks.)
Prompt for creation date between date 1 and date 2. This way you don’t have to edit the query every year, you just fill in the desired dates every time you want to run it.
Besides limiting to and reporting out those values, the query also reports out the MMS ID, title, and publication date. The MMS ID is necessary to accomplish the export, I’m just used to seeing the other values.
- In Analytics, go to Catalog, find the report name, click Open, fill in the date range, click OK, and it gives the results. Look them over briefly to see if anything is amiss.
- Export the results to Excel.
- Edit the Excel spreadsheet to include only the column containing the MMS ID, with a column header MMS I
- In Alma, go to Admin/Manage Jobs and Sets/Manage Sets. Choose Add Set/Itemized. Give the set a name, maybe a description, Set Content Type Physical Titles (if you limited the Analytics query to only physical locations—otherwise set the Content Type appropriately). At the bottom is a section called Add Contents From File to Set.
Select From File and browse to the name of the Excel spreadsheet created in Step D. Then at the top, click Add Members to Set. Alma creates the set.
- Instead of Step E, you now might be able to just input the name of the Analytics report and hopefully Alma would do the work needed. It might not work due to the prompt, you might actually have to put the date range in the query as a filter on the creation date.
- Run the Alma Job Export Bibliographic Records on the set created in Step E.
Physical format: Binary
Output format: MARC21 Bibliographic
Number of records in file: One File
Export into folder: Private
You’re not FTPing anything so leave those boxes blank. Click Next, then Submit (top right)
This gives you a MARC file to send to YBP (or another enrichment vendor).
- Reloading those records upon return (load profile).
- In Alma/Resources/Cataloging/Open Metadata Editor, select Rules/Merge Rules. I created this merge rule (see screen shot at end) (“exists” is not a typo—see screen shot of merge rule):
rule "Merge incoming 505 520 into existing Alma record"
when
merge
then
add MARC."505" if does not exists
add MARC."520" if does not exists
end
- We are profiled to have YBP add a 505 or 520 ONLY to those records that don’t already have a 505 or 520, and to return to us ONLY those records to which they added a 505 or 520. This is usually about 1/3 of all the records we send.
- Reload the records using this Import Profile and Merge setting:
Profile name (you can name it anything you want): Merge YBP TOC and 520
Originating system: WorldCat (because we get all of our book records from OCLC originally)
Import Protocol: Upload File/s
Physical Source Format: Binary
Encoding format: ISO8859_1 (Although records in Alma are UTF 8, YBP returns them as Marc 8 (non-Unicode). If your vendor returns them as UTF 8, use that as the encoding format.)
Source format: Marc21 Bibliographic
Status: Active
Match Profile:
- Match by Serial/nonSerial: Yes
- Serial match method: Unique OCLC Identifer Match Method (you could also use 001 to MMS_ID, it is actually probably better)
- Non Serial match method: Unique OCLC Identifer Match Method (you could also use 001 to MMS_ID, it is actually probably better)
- Match Actions
- Handling Method: Automatic
- Upon match: Merge
- Merge/Overlay
- Merge method: Merge incoming 505 520 into existing Alma record
- I leave everything else blank, although I did select Ignore originating system.
- Automatic Multi-Match Handling: Skip and do not import unresolved records
- Handle Record Redirection—your choice. I have Keep It for Canceled Record and the same Merge Method as in Step 5.a.
- No Match—Upon no match, do not import
I do not set anything in the other 2 tabs, Set Management Tags and Inventory Information in the import profile.
Run the import on the file returned by the vendor.
The Analytics Query