2018 Conference and Developers Day

Alma

In September 2016, the libraries of the University of Cambridge and colleges began the programme to migrate its nine Voyager databases to Alma. The data migration process was very challenging and towards the end of the process in December 2017, the patron records were in an unusable state. We had a window of two days in January 2018 in which to extract the patron records, correct them and load them back into Alma before we could go live. The Alma Users API was judged to be the best option which would enable us to fix the problems with the data. This presentation reviews our experience with the Alma API in general and the User API in particular. It covers the challenges we encountered and how they were resolved. Finally, it provides recommendations on how the API can be improved upon to delight developers working at scale.

Developers Day