Description

Alma's search index for various entities such as Bibliographic records, electronic portfolios, items, etc. is based on Apache Solr, an open source enterprise search platform, which is one of the most popular enterprise search engines.

We perform regularly maintenance jobs and monitoring of the index in order to verify that the index reflects Alma's database.  

There may be unexpected cases where the search index is not entirely up to date, which can cause the following issues:

1. A record can’t be found in Alma

2. A record can’t be found by searching for some of its identifiers (Example: a bib record can be found only when searching for its MMS ID but not when searching for ISBN)

3. A deleted record can still be found by searching in Alma

To verify this is an indexing issue:

Search for the missing record in Analytics (make sure that the record was not deleted, since deleted records can be found in Analytics but not in Alma).

If the record exist and is active in Analytics,  but can’t be found in Alma, it might be an indexing issue.

Resolution

Most indexing issues can be solved by re-saving the record or the parent record (Example: If a physical item record is missing, re-save its holdings record):

1. Opening the record for editing
2. Save it.

In the following cases, contact Alma Support:

1. Re-saving the record or the parent record didn’t solve the issue.
2. Number of records affected by the issue is too big to be re-saved manually.
3. The issue was caused by a specific repeatable scenario.

• Article last edited: 17-Sep-2017