Simple Alma printing
13 Jan 2015Quite some time before implementing Alma we had decided that we would no longer be generating printed notices. The only thing we would be printing would be hold shelf slips to be placed into requested items before placing on the hold shelf. This simplifies the task, but I think that the solution we came up with is extensible if more printing than this is required.
With Aleph the hold shelf slips were produced using a USB Epson receipt printer attached to an Aleph workstation. This was convenient and quick. We decided to just use a standard networked laser printer, printing A5 slips, rather than ordering a networked receipt printer. We could always get a receipt printer if necessary. Two years on we are still using the laser printer and A5 slips.
Within Alma a patron account ‘Alma Print’ with primary identifier ‘alma_print’ is defined. This account has the email address ‘alma_print@lancaster.ac.uk’. The ‘Alma Print’ patron definition is required so that ‘XML To Letter Admin’ in ‘General Configuration’ can be configured to send the data for notice generation. This is a useful convenience when developing the formatting of letters.
The printer (which happens, in our case, to be ‘Printer no. 4’)used for hold shelf slips is defined to have the email address ‘alma_print@lancaster.ac.uk’. This is configured in ‘Fulfillment Configuration/Printers’. Then ‘Printer no. 4’ is defined to service the default circulation desks in ‘Fulfillment Configuration/Printers’.
Now when a hold shelf slip is generated the html formatted email is sent to the email address ‘alma_print@lancaster.ac.uk’. This is picked up at the university mail hubs and forwarded to the email address ‘alma_print@library.lancs.ac.uk’. ‘library.lancs.ac.uk’ is a Linux server used by the library to perform a number of tasks, hold shelf slip printing being one.
In this server there is a Linux user account, ‘alma_print’. This is a standard user account. The server ‘library.lancs.ac.uk’ is able to do network printing to the printer ‘exit_desk’, which is where we want the hold shelf slips printed.
The widely available and venerable mail processing tool ‘procmail’ is installed on this machine. If a configuration file ‘.procmailrc’ exists for a Linux user account ‘procmail’ automatically processes all email received for that user. The ‘.procmailrc’ for ‘alma_print’ is configured to store a backup of the email and pass it to a shell script, ‘process_mail’ which does the necessary printing.
‘process_mail’ is very simple. A case statement takes action based on the subject parameter. In our case we are only interested in hold shelf slips which have a normalized subject of ‘Resource_Request_Slip’. A shell script, ‘get_html_from_message’, is called which extracts just the html from the file. ‘get_html_from_message’ is a tiny ‘awk’ script. We are not interested in the attached logo or barcode for our hold slips. The html is passed to ‘html2ps’ to convert to postscript and directed to the defined printer. ‘html2ps’ is a widely available Linux utility.
It couldn’t be any simpler. It has been in production use for 2 years with no issues. The only management involved is an occasional cleanup of the logs and backed up emails. Do note however, that due to the amount of cloud, internet and local infrastructure plumbing between Alma and the printer that printing of slips is not immediate as was the case with Aleph. The slip can arrive at the printer seconds after the item has been scanned. Sometimes it takes much longer. Email infrastructure is not designed for interactive work. This has entailed small changes to the local work flow.
Should printing of a wider variety of notices be needed ‘process_mail’ can be extended by adding functions and modifying the case statement to act appropriately based on the subject of the emails received.
The source is available at https://bitbucket.org/ditlul/alma-printing
This post is available at https://developers.exlibrisgroup.com/blog and http://jhkrug.github.io