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9 results found

  1. AFN Fulfillment Network, Add patron's home institution to the fields available on the hold shelf's display

    When an Automated Fulfillment network allows for their patrons to pick up materials at any Institution in the AFN, it is possible for a patron to pick up their item at a third institution, that is neither the patron's home library, nor the item's home library.

    With how Alma currently manages Linked Users, and with the fields available for display on the Active and Expired hold shelf screens, library staff at that third (pick-up only) institution are unable to determine which institution the patron is from.

    This is because:

    Since the patron is not a local patron to the pick-up…

    208 votes
    Accepted  ·  10 comments  ·  Fulfillment - General  ·  Admin →

  2. Fulfillment Network: when a patron loses a book from another institution, allow for automated blocking of that patron at all institutions

    So in other words, when a patron from institution A checks out a book from institution B and then Alma marks it is lost, it would be great if Alma could automatically place a consortial block on that patron so they are unable to check out books from any institution. We currently have this working as a custom integration using the Alma API, but it would be great if this were native functionality in Alma.

    50 votes
    Accepted  ·  6 comments  ·  Fulfillment - General  ·  Admin →

  3. Converting Physical item request to Digitization or Borrowing request

    It would be great if we could convert a Physical item request to e.g. a Scan request or a Borrowing request.
    For instance: our patron places a request in another Library from our institution ( = In transit Physical item request), but it turns out the book is damaged (-> convert to Patron digitization request) or lost and cannot be supplied. (-> convert it to a Borrowing request)

    126 votes
    8 comments  ·  Fulfillment - General  ·  Admin →

  4. Provide birthdate information in search results of patron search

    When searching for patrons through Fulfilment>Manage Patron Services, it would be useful if the search results included the patron's birthdate so that library staff had a unique identifier to check against when there a multiple patrons with the same name.

    223 votes
    Accepted  ·  2 comments  ·  Fulfillment - General  ·  Admin →

  5. Change item information RESTORE change type should allow clearing temporary item information.

    When using the Restore change type under Change item information, the only change made is toggling the "item is in temporary location" back to NO. Any values filled in for temporary library, temporary location, temporary item policy, temporary call number, etc. remain. Restore should clear those fields, or allow operators to keep those fields by unchecking a box that would be checked by default.

    If the item has been scanned to have an item policy for special circ rules, that information remains in the record when it is restored, even though that information is not applied. If the item is…

    214 votes
    5 comments  ·  Fulfillment - General  ·  Admin →

  6. 'Not Needed After' date should be mandatory on patron physical request form.

    It would be helpful if the 'Not Needed After' date is mandatory on the patron physical request form to improve the requesting process for Patrons when there is a high demand for physical items.

    394 votes
    6 comments  ·  Fulfillment - General  ·  Admin →
    Accepted  ·  AdminMoshe Shechter (Alma Senior Product Manager, Ex Libris) responded

    Hi,

    An approach we’ll be looking at is that an optional ‘Last Interest Period’ request policy will, if set, be used to set a default the last interest date (Primo and Alma). This way every request will have a last interest date set by the policy and overridable by the patron.

  7. Fulfillment Borrowing history: allow users to choose to opt in

    Currently the library can turn borrowing history on or off, but the choice applies to all users. For privacy reasons, and in order to avoid subpoena situations, we have it off, but some users do want borrowing history on as a convenience, and are not concerned about privacy risk themsleves. Why not allow those users to opt in to borrowing history, and allow the default otherwise to being off?

    By the way, this "opt in" approach is how most public libraries in Eastern Massachusetts are set up, so our users expect this level of service from us also.

    It is…

    250 votes
    8 comments  ·  Fulfillment - General  ·  Admin →
    Accepted  ·  AdminMoshe Shechter (Alma Senior Product Manager, Ex Libris) responded

    From the Circulation Desk user update form, it will be possible to turn on a ‘keep my loan history’ check mark.

    Patrons that have this check on will not have their loans anonymized when the anonymization process runs.

    It will be possible to get this indication also from API, and from Primo.

    The option to turn ‘keep my loan history’ on should be a library decision

  8. No Auto-Send of Activity Report Letter

    The Activity Report letter automatically tries to send when “Renew Selected” and “Renew All” are selected in Alma Patron Services. This is problematic for a few reasons:

    1. The letter is triggered even when the letter is disabled in Letter Activity configuration. It generates a ‘fail’ message for staff.

    2. The letter slows down processes dramatically depending on how many loans are attached to the account.

    3. A workaround is to use the letter opt-out functionality, but we'd have to continually update all of our users with the opt-out in order for this to work well for us.

    I would like to see…

    186 votes
    Accepted  ·  10 comments  ·  Fulfillment - General  ·  Admin →

  9. Enter 12 hour time with AM/PM

    We have already changed our display to 12 hours in the General configuration (General/Other Settings/systemtimeformat is changed to hh:mm:ss a and it operates correctly.) However, there are still many cases when Alma requires us to input a 24 hour time.

    For example, when we check out an item and need to change the due time, there is no way to input 12 hours with AM/PM. (Screenshot example: http://screencast.com/t/9B9XC2qbl) We must enter 24 hour time. This has caused an ongoing problem of inputting an incorrect due time (such as "17:00" when we mean to input 7PM), causing stressful…

    55 votes
    Accepted  ·  4 comments  ·  Fulfillment - General  ·  Admin →
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