Courses Data Mapping Guide: FOLIO to Alma

Purpose: This page describes data mapping from the FOLIO Courses app to Alma.  During the Alma implementation phase beginning in the fall of 2023, these pages serve as working documents for decision-making about data migration.  Once the migration to Alma is complete, these guides will be retained for reference.

Data Cleanup

Erin posted this on the Basecamp message board on Oct 2:

All of our instructors in FOLIO are stored as strings. It appears that in Alma, the course instructor is tied to their Alma user ID. If that's correct, what would be the recommendation to get instructor names over to Alma? Will we have to do it manually?
Some analysis of instructor names via Google Refine shows we have expected "cruft" because we did not clean up strings from Aleph. Lots of typos, differing orders, "Staff Dept" and "Staff Department", etc. etc. Erin has stored analysis in excel sheet in Box folder.

Response from Chana at EL: If you are manipulating the data already you can start adding in the primary identifiers to the data directly so it migrates. You can also try to fix the data in Folio before you extract. If it's not possible before TL, then it can be a project for Cutover. If you are not comfortable with that route, or don't have time to fix the data, you can either do it manually or through the API for courses - https://developers.exlibrisgroup.com/console/?url=/wp-content/uploads/alma/openapi/courses.json#/Courses/get%2Falmaws%2Fv1%2Fcourses. Many institutions have to do this as it's not common to use the primary ID.