Acquisitions workflow for born digital material
The National Library of New Zealand (NLNZ) is ordering and receiving an increasing amount of born digital material, particularly through Legal Deposit. These publications are collected as individual monograph publications and serial issues, not as part of an aggregation or domain/website harvesting, for the purposes of long term access and preservation in our Heritage Collections. They are publications in their own right, not digitised version of print holdings. Alma’s Acquisitions workflows do not currently have any options to allow for steps that are specific to receiving born digital material.
Our current workflow involves the creation of Vendor records and POLs using a physical workflow (Print Book – One Time or Print Journal – Subscription). This allows us to manage vendor information, orders, claims and occasionally invoices. Born digital material is distinguished by a specific location and material type. We receive each born digital item in the physical workflow and then ingest it into our repository (Rosetta). There is then a synchronisation between systems that creates the digital rep and updates the label information. This means, particularly for serial issues, that we are duplicating data in the receiving (Alma) and ingest (Rosetta). The physical location we use for all born digital material is supressed so that what shows in Primo is the digital rep, not the physical item.
What we would like to see is a suite of born digital options within acquisitions in the same way as there are currently separate options for electronic material. This would include functionality for additional information such as access levels, in vendor management, orders, claims, invoices etc.. Our thinking is that the critical difference in a born digital workflow is functionality where item receipt is triggered by the creation of the digital rep either in Alma or through syncing with an external repository. This would remove the need to enter data twice and would also allow us to manage a claims workflow effectively.
Dale Cousens
shared this idea
Alma now supports acquisition workflows for digital material that enables institutions to manage ordering and receiving of digital material. To enable this functionality, two new PO Line types were created:
Digital One Time (DIGITAL_OT)
Digital Continuous (DIGITAL_CO)
for more information please see Alma June Release Notes:
https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Alma/Release_Notes/2021/Alma_2021_Release_Notes?mon=202106BASE
