Alma Integration: Connecting Other Systems

Abstract

One of the more powerful features of Alma is its ability to interact with other systems. Williams has sucessfully integrated Alma with a wide variety of systems:

-Controller's Office (submiting vouchers each night)

-Student and Personnel Information System (reloading all faculty/staff/student records each night)

-Bursar's Office (outputing student fines and credits nightly)

-Rapid (publishing our A/V, print and electronic journal, and monograph holdings to a OAI, which Rapid harvests)

-OCLC (setting our holdings in OCLC each night; upload our original cataloging each month)

-Elsevier and Ovid ( updating our ejournal and ebook content in ScienceDirect and SP Ovid each week)

-ILLiad (receiving and circulating ILL materials in Alma)

Though most integrations proved successful, some did not accomplish everything we needed them to do; so we needed to improvise and adapt. Many integrations yielded surprises both positive and negative. In this presentation, I discuss the benefits integrations with other systems and services brought us, and also explore the hiccups we experienced along the way. I will pass along some tips and tricks that we uncovered along the way. This presentatiion differs from most because in addition to discussing what we do, I will ask audience members to share what they do. We all have experience, discoveries, "ah ha" moments that we can share and from which we can all learn.