Understanding the testing environment for the data pipeline from Alma to the Books and Media Catalog
- 1 What staff and patron-facing systems are part of the testing pipeline for Alma to Books and Media?
- 2 What is the link to the Books and Media Catalog for the testing pipeline?
- 3 What data from Alma is included?
- 4 When is the data refreshed?
- 5 How can we request to add data to the testing pipeline?
- 6 How can we test requesting workflows?
- 7 How can we report problems we’ve identified using the testing pipeline?
- 8 Pipeline Maintainance
What staff and patron-facing systems are part of the testing pipeline for Alma to Books and Media?
The testing pipeline includes
Books and Media Catalog test site: https://alma-find-dev.library.duke.edu/
Alma premium sandbox: https://duke-psb.alma.exlibrisgroup.com/SAML
Summon preview environment: https://duke.preview.summon.serialssolutions.com/#!/
Test Online Journal Titles pages, via the Alma premium sandbox: https://duke-psb.alma.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/jsearch?query=contains,dbcategory,&tab=jsearch_slot&sortby=title&vid=01DUKE_INST:Services&lang=en&offset=0&journals=category,Arts_Architecture_Applied_Arts
Catalog Request System (CRS) sandbox: https://requests-auxs.lib.duke.edu/
What is the link to the Books and Media Catalog for the testing pipeline?
The Books and Media Catalog test site can be found at
https://alma-find-dev.library.duke.edu/
This version of the catalog has a light blue header at the top of the page with version information - that can help with making sure that you are in the right location for testing.
Note - you must either be working on campus or be on the Duke VPN in order to load the testing catalog.
What data from Alma is included?
The data includes test cases compiled here - https://duke.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/LIB/pages/454787103 - as well as a sampling of approximately ~10,000 MMS IDs from the rest of the Alma premium sandbox.
When is the data refreshed?
All data is published from the Alma premium sandbox, which Ex Libris copies over for us from the Alma production environment twice a year (in February and in August.)
That means that the source data will get out of sync as records in production are added, edited and deleted in between those refresh dates.
We anticipate manually publishing the set of test data from the Alma premium sandbox to the Books and Media catalog test site as needed for testing. We also anticipate that we will periodically do automated publishing of the test data as needed for testing purposes. Unfortunately, we don’t know exactly when these activities will happen, so if you are wanting to get more information about data publishing cadence for a particular questions or project, your best option is to submit a ticket to the Alma Support queue at https://support.lib.duke.edu and a team member will respond to you.
How can we request to add data to the testing pipeline?
Please submit a ticket to the Alma Support queue at https://support.lib.duke.edu with the specific MMS IDs for the records you want to add to the pipeline.
Note that if a record was added to the Alma premium environment after the last premium sandbox refresh, it may need to be reloaded into the Alma premium sandbox first, before it can be published to the testing pipeline.
How can we test requesting workflows?
See https://duke.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/LIB/pages/444039204 and https://duke.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/LIB/pages/528646145 for more guidance on request testing.
How can we report problems we’ve identified using the testing pipeline?
Please submit a ServiceNow ticket via https://support.lib.duke.edu to the Alma Support queue. Staff will monitor incoming tickets and assign them to the appropriate person to review and respond.