Alma Holdings Harvest for RapidILL - Overview
Uploading holdings from Alma to RapidILL is an automated process using OAI - Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). To find out more about the OAI protocol, you can read the OAI page in our developer network. After the initial set up, RapidILL holdings are updated automatically with the latest Alma data without any human intervention.
How do RapidILL Holdings through OAI Work?
Once a week, an automated Alma job publishes an automatically updated set of titles through the OAI protocol. This set is enriched with item information as well so that RapidILL has all the details it needs.
RapidILL automatically pulls this data once a week and processes it into RapidILL holdings. These are the holdings that RapidILL uses to determine which requests you get, and what you own locally.
Each title comes out of the holdings process with 5 key details:
- Title
- ISBN/ISSN/OCLC number
- Location/Collection
- Call Number/URL
- Years/Volumes (journals only)
Configuration steps in Alma
To start updating your RapidILL holdings through OAI, you need to follow these three steps:
- Creating an OAI Integration Profile – This allows Alma to publish through the OAI protocol, and determines what IPs are allowed to access that published information.
- Defining sets – In this step, you define up to 12 sets of titles which will be published. Each set will contain titles that are in the same format, type, and lendable status.
- Creating publishing profiles – This is where the actual publishing is configured. Each set is configured into a publishing profile and enriched with item/portfolio information.
Once you finish, all you need to do is contact us, and the Support team will configure RapidILL accordingly.