Managing Resource Sharing Partners in Alma
Nishen Naidoo, Macquarie University

• Used to use VDX – external system, not transparent to end-user. But good that partners were managed centrally.
• Alma provided single system, no additional user system integration, user experience via Primo and much richer. But partner management is up to each institution.
• Connection options: broker (all requests via intermediary which handles billing) vs peer-to-peer
• managing partners – contact details, and suspension status. Tricky to do this automatically so most people updating manually based on LADD webpage (AU suspension info), ILRS (AU addresses), Te Puna csv (NZ contact details), mailing lists announcements (NZ suspension announcements)
• part 1 designed harvester to scrape data from these sources and put it into a datastore in json. Also capture and store changes eg of inst name or contact email.
• part 2 designed sync service (API) to get data from datastore and upload to Alma. Needs your NUC symbol, an API key with read/write to resource sharing, and a configuration in Elasticsearch Index. (There’s a substantial technology stack.) Then pulls partner data from your Alma institution, and sync service creates partner records, compares with existing, updates Alma with changes.
• future – hope to host in AWS. Wanting to get LADD/Te Puna to release data through proper API. Ideally Ex Libris would get data directly but at the moment can understand they wouldn’t want to touch it with a bargepoll.
• documentation and download at https://mqlibrary.github.io/resource-sharing-partners-harvest/ and https://mqlibrary.github.io/resource-sharing-partners-sync/