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Books & Media (find.library.duke.edu) URLs for Aleph-born records migrated to Alma
When an Aleph-born record is exported from Alma to find.library.duke.edu, the export creates the URL that will be used in Books & Media.
To prevent library staff from needing to fix hundreds of thousands of URLs when Alma goes live, the project team decided that for Aleph-born records, they would continue to use the same Books & Media URL as they did when we were running Aleph.
Example:
An Aleph-born bibliographic record has a sysid of 006288172
When that record is migrated to Alma, it has an MMS ID of 990062881720108501
When that record is exported to Books & Media, it will live at this URL: https://find.library.duke.edu/catalog/DUKE006288172
Books & Media (http://find.library.duke.edu ) URLs for Alma-born records
For Alma-born bibliographic records, the MMS ID will become the number that is in the Books & Media URL.
Example:
An Alma-born bibliographic record has an MMS ID of 99112809063108501
When that record is exported to Books & Media, it will live at this URL: https://find.library.duke.edu/catalog/DUKE99112809063108501
Catalog Request System URLs
The URL for the catalog request system will use the same number as the URL for the Books & Media record.
Example for an Aleph-born record
An Aleph-born bibliographic record has a sysid of 006288172 and an Alma MMS ID after migration of 990062881720108501
The Books & Media URL will be https://find.library.duke.edu/catalog/DUKE006288172 and the request system URL will be requests.library.duke.edu/item/006288172
Example for an Alma-born record
An Alma-born bibliographic record has an MMS ID of 99112809063108501
The Books & Media URL will be https://find.library.duke.edu/catalog/DUKE99112809063108501 and the request system URL will be requests.library.duke.edu/item/99112809063108501
Other questions
Will we continue to use the Aleph sysid for the URL for Aleph-born records in perpetuity? It makes the URLs inconsistent.
The project adopted the approach of preserving the Aleph sysid in the Books & Media URL because we had a requirement to prevent those URLs from breaking at cutover, and limited time to implement a more complex solution for redirection. We intend to evaluate this approach after we cutover to Alma and determine the best path forward to enable all records to use the full MMS ID in the URL so that the format is consistent. There is no anticipated time frame for when that work might happen.
If we happen to use an Aleph-born record’s full MMS ID in the Books & Media URL, will that resolve to the correct Books & Media page?
This question is asking something like “If an Aleph born record has an MMS ID of 990062881720108501, will the url https://find.library.duke.edu/catalog/DUKE990062881720108501 resolve?”
The answer is no - in this case, you’d receive a “We’re sorry, your page isn’t here” 404 message.