It appears that this might be coming soon as of the December 2019 Sneak Preview in the November 2019 Release Notes:
"Addition of 'Completed Loans' Count on a Title Level Searches - When searching for 'All titles' or 'Physical Titles' a new count will be added to aggregate the total number of 'completed loans', 'year-to-date loans' and 'in-house loans' as well as last loan/in-house loan dates when relevant."
However, I'm more than a bit sad that this includes in-house loans, as we don't use this for true user activity, it is often wrong because staff forget to untick that box on Scan In, and also we've had integrations go haywire with checkin machines looping thousands of in-house loans, so this will be very misleading.
Can in-house loans please be split out of this, or otherwise sites given an opportunity to disable it by institution setting if not?

In addition to the reasons described below, which also apply to us, we would like access to total number of loans / circulation transactions so that this data can be used in API development.

I totally agree with this idea. It's tedious to go into the item history and manually count every transaction to get an idea of an item's use, and not everyone will have access to or immediate understanding of Analytics. Frequency of circulation seems like an obvious and easy field to add into item records.

Thanks Stacey, for a clearcut comment.
Naomi

Hi Moshe, your response focused solely on one use case of weeding, when I detailed that the same need for this data can be applied to other use cases such as replacing a copy if needing repair, goes missing, or is Lost and Paid.
Use cases are great but can be picked apart and mapped to undesirable workarounds. We simply want to be able to quickly see our usage data for a physical title, from within our inventory management system directly, which is a logical and reasonable request.
It can be very easy for people in systems positions (for which I include myself) to forget that you have to learn how to use a system like Oracle, and the specific data which goes into it, and that learning is constant. Even staff who use Analytics regularly can sometimes forget vital fields such as Lifecycle, or how our migrated data from our prior LMS is mapped, or that they need to exclude In House Loans. This learning curve is one reason why we limit the Designs Analytics role, so that data is not incorrectly reported.
While this functionality is not available in Alma, I’ve configured a Main Menu dashboard for our staff where they can pop in an MMSID or string of them, to quickly get some overall title loans data. I have not included Requests data at this stage, as there are bugs which I won't go into here.
But before this is again considered a solution for this Idea, I will emphasis once more that the Analytics fields are very limited both for the intellectual entity and for inventory, and do not include all the data that our non-systems staff may want and need to see to make their decisions.

We migrated from Aleph to Alma earlier this month. I've produced instructions for some of the Collection Team's processes, including reviewing item level circulation data. I'd been puzzled by the lack of title level circulation history in Alma, but had been told it's possible to do this in analytics.
I would add our voice to the comments already made here: many collections-related decisions are made at title level by reviewing the total usage across the number of copies held since the title was bought.

Hello Moshe, as Stacey stated before :"many staff do not work a great deal in Analytics". I will described some very common scenarios: 1. lecturer calls the circulation or the acquisition librarian and asks for more copies of his book because he has a big class. The librarian can see in a glimpse of en eye, without entering analytics nor any tasks list - that the book is not so popular as it should be... 2. The librarian sees that one shelf is over packed, she picks some multi copies books and checks their history. It is not a big weeding project, but a day to day task. In Aleph we had this functionality of "all copies history" with dates, and it was very useful for library daily life.

Wouldn't the weeding process be triggered by a report of low usage items rather than by looking at a specific item in Alma ? Perhaps mapping the relevant bib information to the local fields that can be added to Analytics would help ? The relevant Analytics reports can be mapped into sets that are used by automatically activated jobs to create weeding tasks, see http://exl-edu.com/01_Alma/Whats_New/2018-05/Create_a_Set_in_Alma_from_an_Alma_Analytics_Report/story_html5.html

Thanks Stacey, you described the need for this improvement better than I did.
Naomi

For Moshe's question of "Why do you need that information per title?", my immediate query is "Why would I need that information per item?"
I can't think of a scenario when I've ever cared the loans for a specific item.
It is always by title.
As others have mentioned, if weeding, you'd look at your title in general to see if it should be retained, and you consider how many you have, and where they are (if multiple libraries) and you consider demand for the title by usage. The title is important, not the item. If you decide that, of your two copies you are keeping one, you keep the one in the best condition, not the one with the most loans.
Same for deciding to replace a copy if needing repair, goes missing, or is Lost and Paid. You don't consider the use of that specific copy, but use as a whole for the title.
As others have also said, this accumulated reporting is possible for Analytics but bibliographic data in Analytics is not at all comprehensive, and all important local notes may not be included with current mapping field limitations. In sum, the full data required to make some decisions is only in Alma. As well, many staff do not work a great deal in Analytics, but are comfortable and familiar with Alma as their core record management system.
I'd be interested in hearing any scenarios from anyone where you would care about item by item use.
Perhaps it was easier to design in Alma by item display, but for a customer actually using Alma for these sorts of specific tasks, it does not meet this need.

This idea is in alignment with the growing practice of robust selection/deselection workflows for individual libraries based on relevancy/usage of titles in shared print retention programs throughout the United States.

When you need to provide quick statistics of certain title loans, for reason of weeding or acquisition, it's tedious to look at each item history. I know we can do it through analytics, but it would be much more easier for the librarian to see the loans sum for a title, in the fulfillment screens - either on the items page or even in "more details" under the title.
Thanks.

When you need to provide quick statistics of certain title loans, for reason of weeding or acquisition, it's tedious to look at each item history. I know we can do it through analytics, but it would be much more easier for the librarian to see the loans sum for a title, in the fulfillment screens - either on the items page or even in "more details" under the title.
Thanks.

Hi,

The loan history is listed per item. Why do you need that information per title ?

Thanks,
Moshe