Manual Deleting of User (Patron) records and need for consistency in maintaining reportable data
At present Alma has an inconsistent method of maintaining reportable patron data when a user record is deleted. The reality is that the policies established by an institution (to keep fully reportable, or keep statistics, or fully remove) do not apply when a patron record is manually deleted - ie. Deleted in: Administration > User Management > Find and Manage Users.
“Users that are manually deleted in Alma are fully removed from the system” regardless of institution policy. The Queensland Health Libraries would like to have this situation changed so that manually deleting a user (patron) record would maintain the reporting needs of the institution as specified in their policy settings. In our situation (16 libraries as one institution) it is often easier to delete a single user manually than to try and add them to a job. We see no logical reason why deleting a patron manually should provide a different policy setting from deleting or purging patrons via a job.
Chris Parker
shared this idea
-
Jung Ah Lee commented
I agree that this seems to be a system defect. Please provide a fix.
-
Kurt Vollmerhause (QUT)
commented
Supported. The institutional delete user policy should be applied consistently, regardless of the method used for removal. There are often use cases in which it is inefficient to deploy the Purge Users job for only a single identified user record, or a small number of records, which might better be deleted manually. An example for our institution is the annual purge process for community cohorts such as alumni, which (from Analytics reporting) may well produce only a few candidates for removal.
-
Joe Montibello commented
This feels more like a bug than an enhancement request. I hope it can get enough attention to get it fixed.
-
Jamen McGranahan
commented
I do agree with this and have found it a pain to remind staff to not delete users.
-
Stacey van Groll
commented
I agree that the policy set by the institution should be upheld regardless of the method for removing a user account.
I also find it confusing that the 'Delete User Policy' is completely disregarded when you delete a user account manually directly in the account, but it is taken into account when running the Purge Users job. Why is it not called 'Purge User Policy'?
Stacey van Groll, University of Queensland