There are lots of tables in the Alma UI that come up which can be sorted by a couple of the column heads but not others. For example in Letters Configuration, you can sort by "Letter" or "Description," but not by "Enabled," "Channel," or "Retention Period." Being able to sort by column headings is a basic function of a table.

In the example above, it would be helpful to be able to see only those letters that are enabled, or to sort so that all the email letters are grouped together and all the SMS letters are separate from them.

So much of what we do in Alma is arranged in tables like this, so it would be great if they could be made more user friendly.

In Alma task lists ...

• Electronic resources - activation - unassigned (Electronic Resource Activation Task List)


• Order Lines - review - unassigned (Purchase Order Lines in Review)


• Invoices - review - unassigned (In Review Invoices)

... there is only a row action ("..." button) to start the "Assign to" dialog which opens a pop-up window where you can select a user. Our colleagues are not satisfied with this cumbersome assignment functionality.

The missing functionalities are:
(1) a one-click "Assign to me" button
(2) a bulk functionality for "Assign to" and "Assign to me" (it is already possible to mark several records in the task list but you can only change the Status with a bulk action)

The collection Bokbasen Allvit (which contains Norwegian academic e-books) is now added to CZ. There is a need for a solution for the administration of this collection. The library administrator can at any time purchase a new time-limited e-book license or change the budget for pay-per-loan titles. This, in combination with time-limited licenses expiring at different times and days (365 days after the purchasing date) will cause the catalogue of available titles to change continuously. The catalogue will also be different per institution. In order to provide the end-user with accurate information about the availability for each institution, there is a need for an automated process for updating the inventory.

Due to the organic flow of titles in and out of the catalogue, Bokbasen needs to be able to update the different institution catalogues with availability statuses in rapid intervals. Hopefully this could be solved by an update of holdings from Bokbasen via the Integration Profile > Upload Electronic Holdings, on a daily basis.

To sum it up: In order to reflect the availability for each institution, we would like to have Bokbasen added as a provider in the Upload Electronic Holding functionality in Alma.

We would like desk operators to have the option of selecting from a list of predetermined check out periods for items in certain collections.

Boston College Libraries currently provide approximately 80 laptops to community members, which can be borrowed for a fixed loan period. For many patrons this static loan period is either too short or too long, adding some loan period choices would enable us to easily meet the needs of more patrons.
Currently in Alma, offering a variety of loan periods would require the creation of additional locations and terms of use. Doing so would enable us to move subsets of our inventory to each location, however, this is an inherently a rigid way of inventory control. What we are looking for is a more flexible system that enables our entire laptop inventory to circulate for a variety of loan periods.

The imagined workflow:

1. Patron comes to borrow a laptop.


2. The laptop is loaned in Alma


3. The operator is presented with a dialog box with a series of loan period options (configured at the library level) - for example (4 Hours, 1 Day, 4 Days, 7 Days).


4. The operator asks the patron which loan period meets the need and makes the selection in Alma to complete the loan.

Thank you for considering this request.

CZ collections vary in regard to the quality of their metadata. Some CZ collections contain rich MARC records, while others contain very poor records. When facing the question whether to import vendor's MARC records or to rely on CZ records, librarians usually lack basic information about the quality of existing MARC records in a given CZ collection.

I would like to suggest that each CZ collection will include basic statistical information about the MARC records quality. Such information could be generated in different ways.

One possibility is to provide an analysis based on predefined quality profiles of MARC records. Here, specific profiles of MARC record quality would be defined (such as: 'brief', 'basic' and 'rich'), this in accordance to the type and number of MARC tags included in each profile. Based on those predefined quality profiles, each collection would then include a summary of the percentage of records fitting each quality profile. The librarians could see that CZ collection 'X' contains 10% 'brief' MARC records, 60% 'basic' MARC records, etc.

Second possibility (complementary to the previous), would be to provide a general MARC tags count for all the collection records. Here, librarians would easily see the frequency of each MARC tag in the records set. With this information provided, it would be easier for librarians to assess the MARC records quality of a collection, judging by the percentage of records that contain certain tags, as ISBN (020), ISSN (022), subject heading (6xx), etc. Preferably, within the CZ collection view, librarians would be provided with a summary of the information, focused on several important tags (ISBN/ISSN, authors, subject heading, etc.), and an option to download a full frequency analysis report.

We would find it useful if the overlap analysis tool could also compare against print holdings, as well as electronic. Currently it only allows you to compare overlap within electronic titles, however the functionality of the tool is useful in that you can upload a file containing a list of identifiers, set up the overlap and leave it to run.

The only way to conduct print and e overlap analysis in Alma at the moment is to use the Title level overlap analysis dashboard in Analytics, which includes various overlap reports and includes both print and electronic. However, we have found problems in using these reports and Analytics in general to conduct overlap analysis, namely that the reports are slow to load, frequently time out, and if matching on ISBN/identifiers, there is a limit to the number of these which can be included at any one time. For example, we often need to check large numbers of titles (e.g. around 150,000) to see what we currently hold in either print or e. Using analytics, with a limit of 9999 ISBNs, the report would need to be run a large number of time to cover all ISBNs.

Being able to conduct overlap analysis between print and e is important for us in terms of making purchasing decisions and we feel that including print in the overlap analysis tool would make this a more efficient process within Alma

Hi,
We have dedicated librarians working on digitizations, and sometimes the item they have on loan and like to scan is not suitable for the digitzation process (notes, underlining etc).
They would then like to request another item. This request will be rejected in Alma due to policy. An item can not be requested when you already have a an item from the same bib record on loan. They would, of course, like to keep the original item on loan until they have checked if other items are more suitable.

You are able to request if the items have different policy (enablerequestduringloanfordifferentpolicy value is true in the Customer Parameters Mapping Table), or if the items are differentiated from one another using the description field https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Alma/KnowledgeArticles/ConfiguringAlmatoAllowMultipleRequestsonA_Title.

This is not the solution for us.

We would like an additional option to these two under Block preferences in Alma:

24 Item of the same title is already on loan for this patron. Parallel loan is prohibited. Actions= Override by operator

25 An item of the same title was recently loaned to this patron. Actions= Override by operator

?? Item of the same title is already on loan for this patron. Request is prohibited. Actions= Override by operator

Boston College would like to be able to configure Alma so that work orders are auto-created for materials in a designated location when they are placed on loan.

Here is the desired workflow:

1. Item is loaned.


2. At the same time, Alma automatically places a work order on the item.


3. When the item is returned to the managing circulation desk the work order is triggered and the item is routed to the correct work order department for processing.

The purpose of this request is to improve the management of the laptops that Boston College Libraries loan to patrons, and to facilitate the implementation of an online laptop availability tool.