From time to time, a vendor interface goes down temporarily. While we follow the access issue up with the vendor, we add a public note for our students and staff indicating that the interface is temporarily down. The issue is that often we have many electronic collections with the same interface, and therefore must add a public note to each and every electronic collection that uses the affected interface, and then remove all of the notes once access is restored.

Since all of these electronic collections link back to a single interface, it would be great if there were a field in the interface screen to add a public note about temporary interface unavailability that would appear in the discovery layer for all eresources (portfolios) in the electronic collections linked to that interface.

This would improve the process by significantly reducing the time it takes to add/remove public notes to multiple electronic collections - and also reduce human errors when a public note for a particular electronic collection is missed.

For electronic collections - under the Activation tab for Service temporarily unavailable:

Instead of selecting a date to turn the notice on, allow staff to select the date on which the notice will automatically expire, and then on that date, have Alma automatically set the temporarily unavailable button to off and blank out the reason/text box. Also, consider making that text appear in red.

Logistically, it makes more sense for the notice to automatically disappear, since there is no mechanism in Alma to remind the staff member that such a notice has been added to an electronic collection. So setting an expiry date for the notice (instead of choosing when to turn it on) makes more sense to me. Upon expiry, it would be good to automatically email the person who set the notice initially indicating that this notice expired along with the text of the notice. In case the downtime is extended, then the staff member can reset the notice as necessary, until such time as the service becomes available again.

Thanks for considering. Sandra.
Simon Fraser University.

The collection Bokbasen Allvit (which contains Norwegian academic e-books) is now added to CZ. There is a need for a solution for the administration of this collection. The library administrator can at any time purchase a new time-limited e-book license or change the budget for pay-per-loan titles. This, in combination with time-limited licenses expiring at different times and days (365 days after the purchasing date) will cause the catalogue of available titles to change continuously. The catalogue will also be different per institution. In order to provide the end-user with accurate information about the availability for each institution, there is a need for an automated process for updating the inventory.

Due to the organic flow of titles in and out of the catalogue, Bokbasen needs to be able to update the different institution catalogues with availability statuses in rapid intervals. Hopefully this could be solved by an update of holdings from Bokbasen via the Integration Profile > Upload Electronic Holdings, on a daily basis.

To sum it up: In order to reflect the availability for each institution, we would like to have Bokbasen added as a provider in the Upload Electronic Holding functionality in Alma.

CZ collections vary in regard to the quality of their metadata. Some CZ collections contain rich MARC records, while others contain very poor records. When facing the question whether to import vendor's MARC records or to rely on CZ records, librarians usually lack basic information about the quality of existing MARC records in a given CZ collection.

I would like to suggest that each CZ collection will include basic statistical information about the MARC records quality. Such information could be generated in different ways.

One possibility is to provide an analysis based on predefined quality profiles of MARC records. Here, specific profiles of MARC record quality would be defined (such as: 'brief', 'basic' and 'rich'), this in accordance to the type and number of MARC tags included in each profile. Based on those predefined quality profiles, each collection would then include a summary of the percentage of records fitting each quality profile. The librarians could see that CZ collection 'X' contains 10% 'brief' MARC records, 60% 'basic' MARC records, etc.

Second possibility (complementary to the previous), would be to provide a general MARC tags count for all the collection records. Here, librarians would easily see the frequency of each MARC tag in the records set. With this information provided, it would be easier for librarians to assess the MARC records quality of a collection, judging by the percentage of records that contain certain tags, as ISBN (020), ISSN (022), subject heading (6xx), etc. Preferably, within the CZ collection view, librarians would be provided with a summary of the information, focused on several important tags (ISBN/ISSN, authors, subject heading, etc.), and an option to download a full frequency analysis report.

Use case: we consider subscribing to a new database but want to know how it overlaps with ALL of collections we have access.

Current Problems:

Set Comparison
1. The source collection must be activated
2. Have to select ALL target collections by hand

Selected Titles:
1. Kinda works BUT it DOES NOT look at coverage info

tl;dr: please implement something similar to Overlap Analysis in SerSol's ClientCenter.

Credit

Hi All,

Is there an easy way to compare all of our activated e-resource holdings in our Alma Institution Zone against one database we don’t have activated to determine overlap and unique titles?

I’ve been looking in the “Overlap and Collection Analysis” section and it requires the selection of individual collections for the target and source sets. It would be quite laborious to manually select all collections we have activated.

There’s also no clear explanation of what a “source electronic collection” vs. “target electronic collections” mean. Could anyone clarify this?

Also, is it possible run a comparison between two collections that we don’t have activated? I ask because I don’t see a Community Zone option under “Source Electronic Collection.”

I looked in the Knowledge Center and didn’t find answers to these questions in this article:
https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Alma/ProductDocumentation/010AlmaOnlineHelp(English)/040ResourceManagement/070AdvancedTools/010Overlap_Analysis

Thanks in advance.

CR

As an electronic resource librarian, I would like to see a better way to deal with rolling coverage dates. There does not seem to be a good way to deal with gaps in portfolio coverage when there's a moving target date involved. For example, if a title includes perpetual access from 2011-present, and issues 12 years or older are open access, unless you include a public note, what will display is:

Available from 2011 volume: xx issue: xx
Most recent 12 year(s) not available

This is confusing to patrons and librarians alike. It would be useful to have the option to select a rolling date within the "local date information" field, instead of having a separate field that displays rolling date information in a different manner than other coverage information. For example, with the proposed enhancement, you could have date coverage:

Available from 1923 volume: xx issue: xx to 2005 volume: xx issue: xx (or even "issues older than 12 years")
From 2011 volume: xx issue: xx

Make the content of the "authentication note" field (electronic collection editor and portfolio editor) only visible to our legitimate end-users by means of authentication: preferably via sso, another option would be via ip. That way we can register and manage all our username/password information for e-sources from within Alma. And get rid of the in-house solution (according to the Alma-L mailing list other institutions, like us, developed solutions involving a link to an authentication protected page).
Currently the authentication note has the same functionality as the "public note" field. It is displayed to anyone searching in our Primo. There also is no distinction (label) from the actual public note field in the Primo display.

When the URL in a bib record attached to a portfolio is updated (individually edited, or batch load/overlay of records), there should be a setting to the action so that the URL in an attached portfolio would also be updated and we don't have to remember to manually do this. We have had 2 recent instances, one where we used APIs to update bib records using our old PURL manager to use our new one, only to find that the portfolio URLs also needed to be changed separately, and one where we have a batch of vendor records with changed URLs that we had to delete and re-add in order to get the portfolio URL updated. Both of these were large batches... We'd like to tell Alma to synch URLs in the attached portfolios when we make a manual edit, or load/overlay a batch of records.

If there's a way to do this we don't know, please tell us!

Currently to manage the order and organization of license terms in Alma, we have to number each term we wish to use in order. If we want to add or reorder, we need to carefully renumber the existing terms so we don't accidentally use the same number twice and risk overwriting existing terms. While we've all learned work-arounds for this, given the amount of work it takes to maintain our hundreds of licenses, it seems risky to have this form of ordering. It would be much better to have the functionality that appears elsewhere in Alma that allows for lines to be moved up and down in a list. This would prevent any accidental overwrites. This functionality appears elsewhere in Alma so it would be useful to apply it in the license config.