Lag time Publishing from Alma to Primo

Owned by Dan Palodichuk (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Dec 10, 2024 by Chris Lee

Alma to Primo takes 6 hours to a day: How should Circulation desk staff look up course reserve availability accurately at all times? 

 

Reserve Task Force came up with 4 possible options 

 

  1. Have an updated list of everything that is added to course reserve.  

  • Con - Each station would need this list. Therefore someone has to update every list anytime an item is added. 

  • Con - Anyone searching from anywhere other than the reserve desk won’t be updated 

 

  1. Staff can look up in Alma by title/call number 

  • Con – Patron would need to know the tittle or call number. 

  • Con – Time consuming to do this for all patrons who do not find their textbooks in primo. 

  • Con – Not available to anyone that is not searching in Alma. 

 

  1. RSS Feed in the Course Reserve Search screen that has everything that is added that day. 

  • Con – can be ignored since it will be on the side of Primo 

 

  1. Create an API with everything that is added to course reserves.  

  • Pro- Timely course reserve info to all patrons  

  • http://lib2.csusm.edu/reserves/courses.php (Link no longer works)

  • Con – Some schools may not have a programmer that can do this for them 

 

 

Reserve Task Force Voted Option 4 would be the fastest and better option for all 

 

Reserve Task Force emailed Ian for more information about his API and if he would be willing to share it with the rest of the CSU. 

 

Ian’s Response was as follows: 

 

The code is open source and I’m most willing to share with anyone, especially the CSU!  

Each course page does display real-time changes to the list of citations within the course’s reading list (example: https://biblio.csusm.edu/reserves/course_readings.php?cid=806661910001672). So, as soon as a citation is added or removed, that will show up immediately.  

The page with the list of courses updates every 30 minutes - https://biblio.csusm.edu/reserves. The reason for the lag is because is the need to make several calls to the Alma API. However, for us, the list of courses does not change often once the semester starts and waiting 30 minutes for a new course entry to appear was not an issue for us. It is possible to reduce that time further but I have not gotten around to testing that. 

The code is available in a public Bitbucket repository located at https://bitbucket.org/csusmlibrary/primo-alma-course-reserves.  

Please let me know how I can help further. My office number is 760-750-4385 and my mobile is 760-683-4234. 

With the okay from Ian, this are our next steps, 

  • Talk to our Computer Programmers about Ian’s Code and how we can integrated to our Campus Course Reserve.  

  • Reducing the 30 min lag time if necessary