An Inventory Tool That Works: Using Alma APIs to Go Beyond Alma’s Built-in Inventory Functions

Abstract

Have you been putting off doing an inventory of your collections? Do you feel terrible about how much paper goes into printing shelf lists? Are you spending a huge amount of time reviewing lists just to go back to the shelf and find the problem books missing? Come to this session to learn about the Alma API-integrated browser-based inventory tool developed at Georgetown University Library that returns real-time information immediately, and allows scanners to identify and pull problem items while they are still in the stacks! To facilitate the inventory process at Georgetown, the Library IT and Access Services departments partnered to develop a tool that goes beyond Alma’s built-in inventory functions. The tool not only inventories the library’s collections but also performs a check on specific patron-visible data, and only requires a laptop, a barcode scanner, and a Wifi connection to run. During this project student employees scanned hundreds of thousands of items, identifying thousands of metadata problems, including bad call numbers, bib record mismatch, incorrect statuses, misshelved items, and items with no records, that were corrected by staff, resulting in a cleaner database and a more trustworthy catalog. As an added bonus, the tool automatically performs a rudimentary shelf order check on the call numbers, eliminating the need for labor-intensive and difficult shelf-reading projects. In this session, we will provide an overview of the inventory project, staff workflows, and how you can set up the tool to work with Alma at your own institution.