Itemized Set by File Upload - Sets Module

This is the fourth section of the sets module of the Alma Overviews course. The video is at the top of the page, followed by the script.

In this video, you'll review:

Create a Set with Pre-Determined Content

To create a set with an existing file, first you have to create the file. In this instance, if I had an Excel file, and I wanted to use this to delete materials in bulk, I could create a file just of barcodes. Each barcode in a single cell, with a header of Barcode at the top. You might have had people scan these in, you might have had folks type them in, you might have gotten them from somewhere else – it doesn’t matter. Just create a single Excel file with one column, with each barcode in its own cell.

Then, save that file and go to the Admin menu, and Manage Sets, and again, we’re creating an itemized set. So from here, click on Add Set, and Itemized.

Again, give your set the information (type in information) and in this case, I know that these are Physical Items because I want to add Physical Items records for these barcodes. So I’m going to choose Physical Items as my Content Type. Going to keep it Private, and it’s an itemized set.

Now, if you scroll down, you can see the option to Add Contents from File to Set. So here is where I would go to find my file, and it’s in my Downloads (you can see a little preview) and click on Open and it will add that file here. Now, the fun part is, the minute I hit Save, Alma will automatically use those barcodes to conduct a search, and then add all the records found with that barcode search in the Physical Items type to my set. So I click on Save and a job is submitted to add the members to the set.

I happen to know that there are only about 200 barcodes in that file, so it’s going to come up pretty quickly. If I go to Admin and Manage Sets, and right here is my Creating an Itemized Set by Barcode Upload set. If I click on the row action item list and Members, there are my 200 records for each barcode.

Again, I could use this for a weeding project, I could use this for a collection review project, I could use this for a resource list project - any project where having a set of items records that were found by their barcodes would be useful. And, I could continue to search for items – not just by barcode, but by any search term – and add those members to my set. When I’m done, I click Done, and there we are.

If you want more information about creating an itemized set from a file, from the Sets page click on Help for this Page and that will bring you to the Managing Search Queries and Sets section of the Ex Libris Knowledgebase. Under Creating Itemized Sets, if I scroll down a little, I get to Add Records by Uploading a File. This will tell you all… the imported file must be .txt or .csv or an Excel file, and have the correct header at the top of the column. Down below are all of the content types and all of the available headers for that single column of information. See more in the Creating Itemized Sets by Uploading List of Identifiers video here.