Alma
Your feedback matters to us. Help us improve Alma by telling us what you’d like to see using the message areas below. You can also can support something already posted.
We would love to be able to respond to every idea that is submitted, but this is not feasible. We are, however, committed to responding to the most popular ideas—those that have received the most points.
For more information please review our FAQ and guidelines. Thank you.
146 results found
-
More options to limit access to private patron information for student employees
Some libraries hire students as part-time staff at the circulation desks or helpdesks. Per the institution or library policies, for privacy reasons, student employees may not be allowed to search for Alma users or to view the contact details of staff members or other student users.
Currently, access to contact details and searching for users are by default possible to any Alma user with Fulfillment roles. Disabling the ALLOW-USERS-SEARCH privilege can prevent access to users list in Manage Patron Services and auto-complete search in same page, but it does not affect the persistent search for users or access to Admin…
77 votes -
Add Job Category to Staff Login Report
Add the Job category column to the Staff Login Report to facilitate the management of professional accounts
29 votes -
Death of a patron - Need to immediately and permanently cease sending all letters
In the unfortunate event that we learn that a patron passes away, we need a quick, clear, and finite procedure to immediately and permanently cease/stop any and all IZ and NZ notifications to the patron's email account, especially those that are tied to a SIS load (Example: Banner). College administration directs the library to ensure no emails are sent to the deceased's email account. We need to be able to definitively state to college administrators "Absolutely zero communications, automated or manually generated, will be sent regarding the deceased patron's library account from the IZ or NZ."
Existing work-arounds include toggling…
7 votes -
User Record Templates
It would be great if the library could create "templates" for different types of user records that automatically fill in things like the User Group and that have different required fields depending on the type of template. This would make it easier for staff to create user records on the spot.
9 votes -
Allow access to "Roles Privileges" configuration for General System Administrator
Allow access to "Roles Privileges" configuration for General System Administrator
Ex Libris staff have the ability to remove specific privileges from Alma roles via the "Roles Privileges" configuration (User Management - Roles and Registration - Roles Privileges)
Since roles in Alma are not very fine-grained, and roles often grant access to groups of privileges that shouldn't necessarily be granted as a set, it would be very helpful for customers to have access to the "Roles Privileges" configuration.
Ideally we would have the ability to make edits ourselves, but Read-Only access would also be valuable, because it would allow us to:
- …
11 votes -
Ability to pin and fix the facet in authorities search
It would be great if the search facet in the authorities search could be pinned and fixed, so you don't have to click and expand the facets every time you want to filter on a specific vocabulary
1 vote -
Add 'Assigned date' to user roles
We often need to know the date that a role was first added to a user's account. The status date is not static and because we use the API for updates from our SIS the status date often gets updated with random dates. The API updates also make the history tab difficult to use to track down role additions versus changes.
We should be able to easily see a column that includes the date a role was initially assigned/added in the context of all of their roles in the General Information tab.
We also need the date a role was…
4 votes -
Stop "User manager" role's ability to add and delete Alma administrator roles
Ideally, there shall be a separation of managing patron users and managing staff users. If that is not possible, please make it impossible for people with "user manager" role to add and delete administrator roles.
1 vote -
Adding newly registered patrons to the 'Recent patrons'-list
Being able to see patrons entered in a session is very useful, but it would be great if the recent list also included new patrons registered during the session.
Often times, patrons for instance request registration before they find the books they want to borrow. If we could easily access their patron services page when they return with them, it would streamline the process.
3 votes -
Add letter resend to Privileges Report so that it can be added to other roles and removed from Fulfillment Admin
Issue - Currently we need to give staff in reader services the Fulfillment Administrator role so that they can resend emails on users accounts. This role is too significant and gives reader services staff access to change loan rules and other processes.
Solution - Could Letter Resend be added to the Privileges Report so that it can be added to more appropriate roles (User Admin or User Manager). And it could then be removed from Fulfillment Administrator role.1 vote -
user - add option for dynamic purge date - e.g. 12 months after expiration date
Right now the purge date is a static value manually inserted when registering a new user. When the user renews registration, purge date must also be manually updated.
In our library regulations we'd like to purge users after a specific amount of time after expiry date. Keeping purge dates manually up to date is however quite an error prone procedure.
It would be great to have the chance to automatically update the value in purge date when saving according to specific a timespan (e.g. 10 months or 10 years after expiration date).96 votes -
Access Student Photos Securely
Currently, user photos are only available via a web link https://myurl/photo/studentidentifier.jpg. This means that all student photos need to be available over the internet which in the UK is a Data Breach. There needs to be a way that only the student in question or an authorised staff member can see the photo. It is not possible to use 3rd party software like Azure to do this as the cross-site scripting protection gets in the way.
1 vote -
Add option for patron name suffixes like Jr., Sr., or III
Name searches in Alma for names containing suffixes like Jr., Sr., or III yield strange results.
Example: Someone named Joe Johnson Jr. will have first name "Joe" and last name as "Johnson Jr." When performing searches in Alma for "Joe Johnson", "Joe Johnson*", or "Joe *Jr." will not yield any results.
Alma looks for "Jr." as a last name rather than the person's surname. This isn't helpful when SIS has the suffix but the patron may not use the suffix all the time in their everyday life.
Creating the option for a patron name suffix or updating the search for…
4 votes -
Add school address as a configurable option for the user card
In the pop up user card that displays, for example, in the Borrowing Requests screen, you can configure the home or work address to display. Since the mandatory address in our student enrolment system Callista, is mapped to the School address in Alma, please add the School address also as a configurable field for the user card.
1 vote -
Support multiple photo_identifier_type values
Allow the photoidentifiertype to accept multiple codes. Our institution recently changed primaryIDs and our card issue office cannot retrofit their db for legacy users using the old primaryID.
1 vote -
Bulk update block expiry date
In January 2018, fulfillment enhancement was added to allow library staff to manually add a block expiry date and edit the expiration date on an existing block. (See https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Alma/Release_Notes/010_2018/12_January_2018/Alma_January_2018_Release_Notes/04Fulfillment_-_January_2018_Enhancements)
We would really like to have the option to input a block expiry date in the bulk update/notify users job when adding a block type, instead of manually adding the blocks with expiry date one at a time for a batch of library user records.
8 votes -
A "kill switch" for General System Administrators to immediately disconnect individual Alma users
Use case: A library employee (student or staff) responds to a phishing text message by providing their Single Sign-On (SSO) credentials; SSO is used on our campus for Alma authentication. I want to (1) disable all the roles on the library employee's account except for Patron; (2) disconnect the employee if he/she/they/* has an active session in Alma; and (3) be notified with the IP address of the originating computer if he/she/they/* attempts to log in again. I would like to accomplish both #1 and #2 by checking a box ("Disable roles") and moving a slider ("Disconnect user"), WITHOUT having…
57 votes -
Increase time in which the "reset password" link is valid
The link that is sent to patrons to reset the Primo-password is only valid for one hour. We would like to be able to configure this duration, as it appears to be rather short. Our patrons often miss this timeframe and have to resent the link.
21 votes -
New role for limited user account editing
It would be helpful if we had a separate role for User Operator that could edit any user account's contact details and merge user records as well as run analytics on users BUT not change or add roles attached to that account OR delete records. This is primarily to allow circulation staff more control over user accounts but to restrict access to higher-level abilities for cybersecurity reasons.
1 vote -
Allow a block to be created as part of the 'change to lost' overdue and lost loan profiles.
We'd like the ability to create a block when an item is made 'lost' as part of the overdue and lost loan profile schedules.
At the moment we can only add a block on the overdue notification types, which we do for the last overdue notification we send before it becomes considered lost.
However, as soon as the item is changed to lost by the profile schedule it removes the block automatically created by the overdue notification profile.
The advantage of using the profile block is that they are automatically removed if the item is renewed or returned and we…
49 votes
- Don't see your idea?