Using Alma APIs for Catalog Discovery

Abstract

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has implemented catalog discovery using the Alma BIB and USER APIs, and bib data published to Primo. (Live since May 2015.) See https://search.library.wisc.edu. This is our primary catalog discovery interface for the roughly 10.6 million titles held by Madison and 25 other UW System campuses. The catalog is implemented with Ruby on Rails and uses Solr for faceted search. Java and XSLT are used to generate the Solr index (updated twice daily). We use the BIB APIs for checking availability at bib and item levels. We use the USER API for submitting patron requests and for library account management: loans and requests review, renewals, request cancellation, and fine/fees payments. We've encapsulated the use of the Alma API in a Ruby GEM. This talk describes our approach and our experience to date with the Alma APIs (it's been good).