Export ebooks from ALEPH to SFX

Tags: sfx , export , e-books , aleph , advanced
Last Updated: Nov 20, 2009 13:44

• Description

  Finding workflows for handling e-books between systems can be a challenge. We load MARC records into our ALEPH catalog for all of our e-books. Maintaining e-books in both the catalog and SFX is a problem as they often are out of sync. 

  • This is a very local solution for handling the problem. I am not expecting others to implement this as it is, but it can give you an idea on how to handle similar issues and perhaps you get an idea on how to solve this problem at your library.
  • This is how it works at our library: Someone decides to buy a e-book and leaves it to the ACQ department to get it. The ACQ people buys the book and a MARC record is sent to our systems librarian. At the same time a notification is sent to the SFX administrator who looks for the e-book in the SFX KB. If the book is not yet part of the CKB they need to remember that book and over time they have long lists with books that they need to look for after each CKB update.
  • The way we solved this for the SFX administrator was to create a web based export  tool that extracts information on the different e-book vendors and generates a tab delimited file with ISBN:s ready for DataLoader.
  • With this tool the SFX admin can generate a file from ALEPH, run updates and activate old and new portfolios whenever they feel like it. They do not need to maintain any lists or backfiles. This tool saves the SFX admin lots of time and enables the ALEPH catalog and SFX services to be more in sync.
  • When we ran this tool and updated our e-book targets we more or less activated thousands of e-books that had been neglected in SFX.
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• Author: Daniel Forsman
• Institution: Högskolan i Jönköping
• Year: 2009

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• License: BSD style
• Short description: Use, modification and distribution of the code are permitted provided the copyright notice, list of conditions and disclaimer appear in all related material.
• Link to terms: [Detailed license terms]

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• Skill required for using this code:
  Advanced

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State

Stable

Programming language

PHP

Software requirements

PHP5 with OCI8 compiled

Screen captures

Figure 1: A webpage that groups and presents the different vendor packages in the catalog.

Figure 2: The administrator can review the ISBN:s and see how many are lacking.

Figure 3: The administrator can export the ISBN:s to a file prepared for SFX import via DataLoader

Figure 4: The prepared file

Author(s) homepage

http://www.bibl.hj.se

Download

No code available to download, se Installation instructions for code samples.

Working example

This is a user restriced resource, so I can not give you access to a working example... but it works ...

Using the following Ex Libris open interfaces

The beauty of having access to the Oracle database

Installation instructions

As I wrote earlier this is a workflow that is specific to our environment. You might find it hard to implement it exactly the way we hav done it.

1. The first thing you need to do is to add a field to the MARC record when you import your records from the vendor. We add a vendor based code in the 698 field. The codes are vendor specific and this is the only thing we use the field for.

2. In order to query for the 698 field you need to add it as one of your z13_user_defined fields. We have it in the 01 database as field 4.

3. Many e-book records lack ISBN in 020a so you might want to edit the tab that controls how z13_ISBN_ISSN is defined. We added 020z so that z13_ISBN_ISSN lists 020z if there is no 020a.

4. The script below is in PHP and there are comments inline that explain what is going on. I have left out the parts that limit access to script. If you use it you should put it behind IP-restriction or U/P. Also(!) you should include user and password that connects to the database from another place and not leave it in code.

If a user clicks on Create SFX import file link they are sent to a page that creates the Loader file for them. In the code above it is called create_sfx_port.php. This is what it looks like.

TO DO list

Nothing so far

Known issues

Nothing so far

Comments

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