ELUNA 2023 Annual Meeting

After migrating to Alma from III Sierra, we had thousands of items whose enumeration & chronology metadata were only present in the Description field. While this can work for display purposes, the Enum & Chron fields must be populated for sorting and filtering to work properly. We set about developing an automated process to fill the Enum/Chron fields, using the metadata present in the description field.

As a branch campus with about 250,000 volumes / 5000 physical serials, we were able to take a fairly direct approach—picking off the low-hanging fruit and filling their Enum/Chron fields, then moving on to progressively more complex cases. The result is a Python script (available via the Github repository) which should be adaptable for other institutions trying to achieve the same end.

At the end of this session, participants will be able to implement and modify a new tool for enhancing item records in Alma.

Demonstrations

Alma

Intermediate