ramerrick / exlibris-alma-bulk-resource-sharing-requests

Parses through an exported XML file from a citation manager (e.g. EndNote, Zotero) and sends each citation as a resource sharing request to Alma as an API call.

ExLibris-Alma-bulk-resource-sharing-requests

Brief Description: The script places resource sharing (ILL) requests in bulk in Alma from an exported XML file from a reference manager.

Long description/background: The script parses over an XML file exported from a reference manager (Zotero, EndNote and Mendeley files have been tested and work, others may also work). Elements and attributes that are required to request a interlibrary loan are added to lists. A loop is then used to add the elements from the lists into a JSON object that is then sent with a POST call to the Alma user API to place the requests. The API response is then added to a dataframe which contains each citation's details. The dataframe is then saved as an excel file to be sent to the requester.

A pdf with local instructions on running the script has also been included in the repository.

API: Alma, users, read/write
Originally written and executed with Anaconda/Jupyter
Output files: two output files are created Bulk_ill_request_response.xlsx and Bulk_ill_request_response.csv. The csv file is written as each request is placed. This file is created in case the script is suddenly interrupted and halted.

Modules/Libraries used:

• Requests (for API communication)
• Requests.structures import CaseInsensitiveDict (used to create and send JSON data objects)
• Pandas (using data frames)
• Re (regular expressions)
• Datetime (current day/time, used to time)
• xml.etree.ElementTree (used to parse XML file)
• Xlsxwriter (used to create xlsx file)
• ipywidgets import IntProgress (used for progress bar)
• Python.display import display (used for progress bar)

Includes:

• Timing the script from start to finish
• Importing an XML file
• Parsing XML required elements into lists
• Parsing XML required attributes into lists
• Creating a data frame from lists
• Iterating over the list using a for loop, values contained in the lists used to build individual JSON data objects for each fine to be sent to the API
• Post API requests with JSON object and write response to variable
• Selection statement, look for error notifier with regular expressions:
-If there is error: Look for error message in response using regular expressions and contain the message, add it to variable, If there is no error add success message to variable
• Add either success or error message (contained in variable) to the notes column of the data frame
• Write new data frame with updated notes column with error and success messages to xlsx and csv files
• Create a data frame containing the number of each response and add it to sheet two of the spreadsheet.
• Display records processed.

Resources Used:
API console https://developers.exlibrisgroup.com/console/
Rest User Resource Sharing Request: https://developers.exlibrisgroup.com/alma/apis/docs/xsd/rest_user_resource_sharing_request.xsd/?tags=POST (What can be added in JSON object for Resource sharing requests)
Post method with JSON data object https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9733638/how-to-post-json-data-with-python-requests
Pandas cheat sheet: http://datacamp-community-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/f04456d7-8e61-482f-9cc9-da6f7f25fc9b
Regular Expressions Python Capture groups: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48719537/capture-groups-with-regular-expression-python Find substring in string http://net-informations.com/python/basics/contains.htm#:~:text=Using%20Python's%20%22in%22%20operator,%2C%20otherwise%2C%20it%20returns%20false%20.
Update dataframes: https://www.askpython.com/python-modules/pandas/update-the-value-of-a-row-dataframe?fbclid=IwAR3o7WAnpPYk6q7PmyMcpmpW8F9F4EVzV3GR-KoUAdmGPOUaIkELYoZOAhA
Create dataframes: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/create-a-pandas-dataframe-from-lists/
Parse XML in python: https://docs.python.org/3/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html