We would like more order types to choose from when creating additional orders on a portfolio using the “Additional Order” button. Particularly, Electronic Book - One Time and Electronic Title - One Time.

Currently there are only a limited number of order types available when creating an order via this method. This creates inefficiencies, because using the Additional Order button is the easiest, quickest and neatest way to create an additional order on a portfolio.

An example of where this change would be helpful is when purchasing additional copies of a limited-user ebook. Because we don’t have the option of creating an Electronic Book - One Time order via the Additional Order function, we have to follow an unnecessarily convoluted process to create the order and attach it to the portfolio. Simply adding more “type” options for Additional Order would save us a great deal of time.

The new shortloancourtesyreminder & shortloanoverduereminder cannot be configured for multiple locations. For institutions with several hourly loan locations (for example Boston College maintains 2 and 3 hour loan periods for Course Reserves and a 4 hour loan period for some technology items) this dictates that the reminder notice has to be set based on the location with the shortest loan period. The overdue notice must be timed to make sense for for the longest loan period.

In our test configuration we used the following time parameters:

​shortloancourtesyreminder - 105 minutes
shortloanoverduereminder - 241 minutes

However, this creates a situation whereby patrons borrowing from some locations will have already incurred an overdue charge before the overdue notice is sent.

In order for this functionality to provide the service is designed for, it must be robust enough to support different loan periods.

https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Alma/Product_Documentation/010Alma_Online_Help_(English)/030Fulfillment/080Configuring_Fulfillment/110General#Configuring_Fulfillment_Jobs

Sometimes providers change a journal’s publication frequency throughout the year. So, the prediction’s pattern selected / elaborated at the beginning of the year doesn’t work anymore in Alma. One part of predictions (date of receipt) will be ok until the change but all other predicted items will be false. Now, we can revise the prediction during the year but we must erase the items already received. We can also leave the prediction defined at the beginning of the year and edit manually the false items from the time of the prediction change.

It would save a lot of time if Alma could change the description (number, date, …) only for the items that are impacted by a new publication during the year. We would just have to fill the « Next prediction item’s information » with the new frequency.
This enhancement would save a lot of time to catalogers.

It would be great if we could use templates for adding new items.
At the moment, whenever we add an item, for each single one of them we have to manually fill in the same values in "Material type" and "Item call number type". The "inventory date" has to be chosen manually as well.
It would be extremely useful if we could load the physical item editor form with some values already filled in, and with the date fields automatically filled with the current day's date.

If this idea has already been posted or it the option already exists, please let me know.

Thank you and kind regards
Barbara

As a Purchasing operator, I would like a better correspondence between the number of items ordered and the "Quantity for pricing" in the PO line summary.

When we are ordering more than one item of a physical title, we have to add the extra items in the Quick add field, and then have to update the Quantity for pricing field manually. We see that Purchasing operators tend to forget to update both fields. The result is that the number of items that we intended to order, not always corresponds with the number of items that is supplied by our vendors. This causes a lot of extra work for the Receiving operators. The best thing would be if Quantity for pricing were updated automatically when we added new items. If this is not possible, it would help a lot if we could get a warning or a confirmation message when the number of items differs from the number in the Quantity for pricing field.

When the URL in a bib record attached to a portfolio is updated (individually edited, or batch load/overlay of records), there should be a setting to the action so that the URL in an attached portfolio would also be updated and we don't have to remember to manually do this. We have had 2 recent instances, one where we used APIs to update bib records using our old PURL manager to use our new one, only to find that the portfolio URLs also needed to be changed separately, and one where we have a batch of vendor records with changed URLs that we had to delete and re-add in order to get the portfolio URL updated. Both of these were large batches... We'd like to tell Alma to synch URLs in the attached portfolios when we make a manual edit, or load/overlay a batch of records.

If there's a way to do this we don't know, please tell us!