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Repository import profiles for electronic titles - limit matching to specific electronic collection

To avoid accidentally overwriting the wrong records when importing batches of MARC records for electronic collections, it would be really helpful if the matching of incoming records against existing records in the repository could be limited to ONLY titles with portfolios in a selected electronic collection. As the Alma CZ bibliographic records for ebooks are often of poorer quality than the records provided by vendors to collection subscribers, we prefer to import the vendor records and de-link from the CZ record, but the matching on import can't be limited to just the records in the collection, and we often accidentally overwrite print book records with the import, which then have to be fixed manually. If we could limit the matching to only the records in the electronic collection, this problem would be eliminated and the import process would be much less likely to cause problems.

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Fran Abbs shared this idea  ·   ·  Admin →

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  • Esther Arens commented  · 

    Same as Fran and Amanda: thank you and please extend this to PDAs.

  • Amanda Swann commented  · 

    Really pleased that this feature has now been released - it will save lots of time unpicking records.

    I'd agree with Fran that we'd also like to see this feature added to PDA Import Profiles.

  • Fran Abbs commented  · 

    Thank you! We are so pleased to see this added. However, it hasn't been added for the PDA import profiles and is needed there too - please can matching on electronic collection be also added to the Match Profile tab for the PDA Import Profiles?

  • Elizabeth York commented  · 

    I'm echoing others' comments that this would be very useful functionality that would prevent multi-match problems when running imports. I spoke to Ex Libris employees about Rialto EBAs recently, and they are recommending as a "best practice" that libraries using an import profile to import EBA records choose "import as new" instead of matching to existing Alma records because attempting to match using an import profile results in too many multimatches. It's strange that an Ex Libris team is recommending a "best practice" that directly contradicts Alma's own product architecture (Alma is supposed to have provider-agnostic records with 1 record per title with all the portfolios attached to the 1 record!) due to Alma import profiles' inability to handle multimatches efficiently. Moreover, Ex Libris's recommendation to load records new instead of trying to find matches is just going to result in duplicate records, which means our future catalog loads will have even more multimatches! I hope Ex Libris can revisit this request and implement it soon, as it is very much needed and would greatly reduce the occurrence of multimatches.

  • Karl Pettitt commented  · 

    I was just going to add this as it comes up quite a bit for us because we get records from OCLC Collection Manager and they don't have specific vendor numbers for the records. This means there is a lot of multi-matching that happens across our electronic collections. This limit option would help tremendously with automating the import process.

  • Emma Booth commented  · 

    This has been 'planned' for 4 years now - when will we see this functionality in Production?

  • Fran Abbs commented  · 

    Hi Dana,

    Please can we request an update on when this functionality will be added to Alma? It has been at "Planned" for over 2 years now.
    Thanks.

  • Emma Booth commented  · 

    Hi Dana, any update on when we can expect this functionality to be added to import profiles on Alma? - I've had a look at the Alma Roadmap 2019 PDF on the Knowledge Center and can't see it mentioned anywhere.
    Thanks.

  • Alasdair MacDonald commented  · 

    Dealing with multi matches this way would save so much time and effort. I can think of applications for both new records and also managing cases such as sub-sets of records you want to retain at the end of EBS deals.

  • James Glosson commented  · 

    This would also be really useful for deletion MARC records. I recently tried loading a large deletion record set for our EBSCO Academic Ebook Collection, and about 750 of the 2800 records were multi-matches that had to be individually handled. This could have easily been avoided if we were able to scope the import profile to only look for matches within a particular collection.

  • Jane Daniels commented  · 

    Hi, I don't have any votes left but want to support this idea.
    Jane

Alma: Resource Management - Electronic

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