Building eTextbooks Portal with Alma and Primo APIs
Presentation Topic Description
Faculty and students demanded online access to textbooks (eTextbooks) during the COVID pandemic, and the trend toward eTextbooks will keep growing. Users, especially undergraduates, have complained that Primo is slow and complex to find eTextbooks. Can we build an eTextbooks portal that is fast and easy to use? This presentation describes an Oregon State University Libraries project that creates a web application for eTextbooks using Alma and Primo APIs. It will cover the topics:
- Pros and cons of using Alma and Primo APIs to find and access eTextbooks with bibliographic input.
- Building proxy server with Amazon Web Service.
- Examine the performance of Alma and Primo APIs with a test set of more than 700 textbook titles.
- Lesson learned.
The eTextbooks portal described in the presentation is a prototype with a plan for further improvement. The major challenge is that Alma and Primo APIs could be more effective in finding either the holding information or access link for an eTextbook using standard bibliographic data like title or ISBN. Besides sharing the methods and lessons learned from the project, the goal of the presentation is to explore ideas for improving Alma and Primo APIs for finding and accessing eTextbooks.