Allow customers to select multiple retention reasons for Item records.

As an institution that is very enthusiastic about using the new Retention Information data fields for item records in Alma, we would like to request an enhancement that enables a user to assign multiple values to the Retention Reason field. For example, a single item could easily have all of the following statuses applied:

1. Institutional last copy

2. Faculty publication

3. Rare

4. Committed to some Shared Print program

5. Digitized material

Each of these retention reasons may correspond to different library staff workflow. For example, these retention reasons could support the following staff workflows, respectively:

1. Blocking withdrawal/weeding at the institutional (IZ) or consortial (NZ) level by collection development staff

2. Generate a report that can be used to populate a display shelf highlighting local research at our campus

3. Identification of materials that should be prioritized for preservation treatment

4. Block withdrawal/weeding and select for inclusion in data integration/sharing with partners

5. Identification of materials that are good candidates for off-site high density storage

Absent the ability to assign multiple values in a dropdown, which will provide a kind of authority control for approved statuses, we would be dependent on cramming all of this information into the free text Retention Note field. Obviously, this would be more error prone as it would require 100% consistency to achieve the same level of data reporting as the dropdown menu options would have. Additionally, parsing a free text field to find specific substrings in an Alma Analytics report is a much more sophisticated and therefore difficult task to accomplish. This would therefore have the effect of limiting the number of staff who are capable of effectively querying for all retention reasons.