Due to changes of vendors, the links of e-resources may change as well. Some changes like server and domain change may make the old URLs not accessible. However, Alma does not have a URL validation job. While it has a export URLs job, the URLs exported may not be the portfolio link. Although vendor may provide MARC records with updated URLs, when import existing records to Alma, only bib records will be updated, not the portfolio information. For records with PO line associated or local fields and course reserve titles, deleting and re-importing should not be performed just to update the portfolio URLs.
The best way we have found is to check URLs collection by collection. This makes sense to us as one collection is usually come from the same vendor and the URL address should have the same "prefix." We use MARCEDIT and OpenRefine to extract only 020 and 856 fields from the vendor provided MARC record. Then, match the link in the MARC with the URLs in the collection portfolio list using ISBN. Then update the portfolios using porfolio loader.
To extract 020 and 856 fields
Export portfolio list in Alma and sort the URL column alphabetically. Find the rows with old URLs. Copy ISBN values of those rows to a new TXT file with "ISBN" header.
Put isbn TXT file and OpenRefine exported CSV file in the same directory as this Python script: checklink.py. The script takes those two files and generate a new TXT with updated URLs.
To run this script, run the following line in the command: python checklink.py <name of the txt file> <name of the csv file> <name of the output new URL txt>.
Paste those new URLs back to the portfolio list generated from ALMA. Please be noted that ALMA generated portfolio list may contain errors: "." after ISBN or note after ISBN. ISBN should be numbers. Please correct the errors in the portfolio list before load new portfolio list.
