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Introduction
URLs for bibliographic details pages in Books & Media will have different formats depending on whether the bibliographic record was created in Aleph and migrated to Alma, or whether it was created directly in Alma.
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The format of an Alma MMS ID for an Alma-born record is 99 + unique record identifier + 8501
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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
What part of the Alma MMS ID is unique?
The Alma MMS ID is formed of a prefix, a numeric string, and a suffix.
Alma uses prefixes in a record number to identify the record type. E.g., the ‘99’ prefix signifies a bibliographic record; ‘53’, an electronic portfolio; ‘23’, an item record.
That means that it’s important to know that the “unique string” in the MMS ID is only unique within the context of bibliographic records.
If you add the prefix, then the record number becomes unique to Duke’s instance of Alma.
If you then add the suffix that signifies Duke’s Alma install, the record number becomes unique to records across all Alma institutions.
(h/t to Matt Harrington for this explanation)
Other questions
Will we continue to use the Aleph sysid for the URL for Aleph-born records in perpetuity? It makes the URLs inconsistent.
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