Library Answers: Los Rios Common Questions

At Los Rios, our DDA program with GOBI is limited to EBSCOhost titles. We add discovery records and, when titles are triggered, "order" them in Alma. This page describes how to do the first part: set up Alma to automatically retrieve GOBI-supplied MARC records and have portfolios created in a specified electronic collection.

GOBI discovery records

We've learned that even though GOBI's discovery records are not sourced from WorldCat, they are generally of higher quality than Alma Community Zone records. However, by default they may be encoded as MARC-8 rather than UTF-8. It is important to check this because MARC-8-encoded records will sometimes produce display errors in Alma and Primo VE.

To check the character set encoding, open a sample MARC file you received from GOBI in MARCEdit. When on the MARCEdit tools screen, make sure that Translate to UTF-8 is unchecked.

If the records are encoded as UTF-8, then position 9 in the leader will show as a. Remember that you start counting at 0. If position 9 is blank or shows something other than a, the record is not encoded as UTF-8.

If you find that the records are not encoded as UTF-8, contact your GOBI representative and request that DDA discovery records be delivered with UTF-8 encoding. When this has been done, you will receive an updated technical services specification file from GOBI.

(Remember to check Translate to UTF8 next time you use MarcEDIT!)

DDA import profile

You should already have an import profile you run manually to import downloaded discovery records to Alma. We need to:

1. set it to retrieve files from the FTP server and
2. schedule it to run daily.

FTP setup

In Profile Details, set Import protocol to FTP.

Selecting FTP will open up an area on the screen where you can enter the FTP information. Since this is the only place we will be using this FTP server in Alma, there's no need to configure it centrally; we'll just add the details to the import profile. So select Other FTP Site.

• Description: give it a meaningful name
• Server: ftp.ybp.com
• Port: 21
• UserName: you can get your user name from your current FTP setup or from your GOBI-supplied setup instructions.
• Password: see your GOBI-supplied setup instructions
• Input directory: dda
• Is full path: checked
• Leave Max Number of files and Max file size at default
• Leave FTP Server Secured and FTP Passive Mode unchecked.

After entering this info, click the Test Connection button. You should receive a confirmation that the server has been reached.

Prepare FTP server

It is likely that the FTP server you are pointing to has some files on it that you previously downloaded and added to Alma, unless you have been deleting them. You want to avoid having Alma retrieve these files and potentially creating duplicates in Alma. So go to the server and either delete them or create a subdirectory and move the files to it (yes, oddly, we have write access to this server).

Test the import (optional)

Before scheduling the import profile, you might want to ensure that it works correctly. Wait until you receive an email from GOBI about new discovery records being available. Go to Manage Import Profiles and, from the listing, click the More Actions button and select Run.

This will result in two jobs in Alma, which you will find in Monitor Jobs - History once they have completed:

1. Metadata Import w/FTP:[name of your import profile] - this reports on the retrieval of the file from the FTP server
2. Metadata Import: [name of your import profile] (FTP) - this reports on the import of the metadata (bib record, e-portfolio etc.) into the Alma repository. You should be familiar with this report from previous import experiences. It will allow you to browse the imported records. This job will only be run if a file was retrieved in the first job.

Having confirmed that the import is working, you can proceed to scheduling the import.

Schedule the import

When you set the Import Protocol to FTP, a Scheduling area appears below Profile Details. Set as follows:

• Files to import: New (this way you won't need to visit the FTP server and delete old files)
• Scheduler status: Active
• Scheduling: As you like, but every day is recommended, since that will add the records quickly. You might take a look at the timestamp on the GOBI emails you get and set the job for around that time.
• Email notifications: If you want to receive job reports via email, add yourself here.