At the moment Alma offers very little to properly handle Leganto broken links via the task-list menu. Once a Broken Link Alert is removed, the information is gone from Alma entirely. The functionality is inadequate as a workflow for library staff when investigating and recording details of our progress in fixing the problem, keeping students informed and statistical reporting.

We would like to see additional functionality :
• Broken Link Alerts to have a more permanent record in Alma and Analytics
• Introduction of additional fields to capture information about the Broken Links - for example broken link status (e.g. reported, under investigation, resolved), ability to note if the student has been informed & by which member of library staff, nature of problem, resolution date.
• Ability to report on these fields in Analytics
• Ability to sort the list of broken links by Reported date on the Edit Citation page.

Sometimes instructors perform a citation search in Leganto and just add the first result that comes up in the search results; often this is actually a book review or other format that isn't logical for reserves. Additionally, most instructors are searching and expecting the latest edition to appear first in the list. Other faculty from certain departments want to choose a particular edition, and so need edition information prominently surfaced in the search result.

This results in processing delays as staff must check with instructors to clarify what items they really intended to place on reserve.

One possible solution may be to offer an option for faculty to specially indicate that the submitted citation must be filled as specified (format/edition). Something could indicate that by default, any available edition can be substituted for the one added to the list as a result of search.

Situation
One of our tasks in checking reading lists is ensuring that the version of each title is the latest edition. Acquisitions staff will check book citations on a reading list and, if there is a newer edition available, purchase and replace the citation on the list with this new version.

Problem
When a specific title is used on multiple lists, Acquisitions staff are having to manually identify all citations using this title, add the newer edition to the reading list, and remove the older edition from the reading list.

Staff are also having to manually transfer any specific reading/public/resource notes across from one citation to another.

Request
We would like functionality that would allow us to “find and replace”, or “find and merge” all citations populated by a specific repository bibliographic record, and allow us to replace, merge, or overlay the citation details with the bibliographic information from the newer edition while retain citation specific information such as public notes or chapter information.

User story
Checking a reading list, Library staff find a citation for the following title:

Molecular biology of the cell
Bruce Alberts
5th ed
9780815341062

This book is included on 24 reading lists. This includes book citations and chapter citations. Some of the citations include public notes for students.

On checking suppliers, staff identify that there is now a sixth edition available, purchase copies of this title, and import a bibliographic record for this into Alma. The library now has a record for the following title:

Molecular biology of the cell
Bruce Alberts
6th ed
9780815344643

Library staff want a way to search for all the citations that are populated with the 5th ed (9780815341062) and to automatically replace these citations with the records and holdings for the 6th ed (9780815344643) without losing the citation information that is specific to that reading list.

There are many courses that, for a variety of reasons, intentionally do not have reading lists. The fact that this is deliberate is not immediately obvious though, and confusion can arise when people expect there to be a list connected to the course.

Students might wonder if they are doing something wrong, librarians might have to keep separate spreadsheets to note which ones are supposed to be empty and instructors might be confused when asked to make lists in their LMS.

For these courses, there should be some way to identify that the absence of any lists is by design and not by accident. Instead of there being a binary choice (Either there is a list or there isn't), you should have a third option: No list for this course.

It would be good if this was a setting in Alma that could be checked at the course level, and/or something the instructor could choose through the LMS integration. This function should also be reflected in Analytics, so that institutions can easily see which courses have, should have and should not have reading lists.

We are a consortium, and we have a certain number of e-book records without inventory in our network zone. Deleting these records is not an option for us for various reasons.

The expected Alma behavior for such records if there is no inventory is to publish as physical. It applies to both Primo and Leganto.

Use case: an instructor uses the expanded search to check for newer edition of a book they have previously used in a reading list. They add what seems to be a newer physical edition from 2020. In reality, the record is an e-book published as such in 2020, but it has the same content as the 2018-edition, hence no newer edition has been released.

The first issue is that because of the expected behavior, the user is presented with incorrect information.

A second issue is that the library will potentially waste a lot of time trying to track down a 2020-edition that doesn't exist.

As a result, we would like the expected behavior to be changed so that electronic records are shown as such, regardless of the inventory.

When we import course data into Alma, we use a program that extracts all the courses from our course database and produces a ready-to-use import file for any given institution. The course ID in this file is typically something like COURSE-AUTUMN-2021 (Course code, semester and year).

We use the same file if we want to run a rollover, with some manual changes to it. We don't check if the courses we extracted are new, or if there is an existing course in Alma for the year before. Our starting point is the COURSE-ID column, and in OLD-COURSE-ID we write the course code we would expect to see here if the course had been imported into Alma the year before.

In other words: we copy the COURSE-ID (for example COURSE-AUTUMN-2021) into the OLD-COURSE-ID column and modify the year so that it says COURSE-AUTUMN-2020.

COURSE-ID = COURSE-AUTUMN-2021
OLD-COURSE-ID = COURSE-AUTUMN-2020

When doing the rollover operation, if COURSE-AUTUMN-2020 exist in Alma, then COURSE-AUTUMN-2021 will be created and the list from the prior year will be duplicated and assigned to the new course. However, if COURSE-AUTUMN-2021 is a new course and COURSE-AUTUMN-2020 doesn't exist in Alma, nothing will happen. This forces us to go through both a rollover operation AND a separate import operation to successfully import all the new courses into Alma, which takes unnecessary time and increases the chances of mistakes being made. It would be an improvement if these courses were created already during the rollover.

We use the Courses API to load units from our Learning Management System into Alma/Leganto. We would also like to use it to roll over reading lists, however, it is missing key functionality that we require for our workflows.
Because of this we have to manually roll over lists. During peak times this is a weekly job and takes up an undue amount of staff time.
The 2 main improvements we would like to see are:
-Addition of Write functionality for Tags: We rollover citation tags and this is not supported by the API.
-Citation Copyright: When trying to create reading lists via the API, the copyright statement is copied, with a resulting status of 'Approved', but it is not re-calculated in the same way as it would be if rolled over in Alma. E.g. the copyright status should be (using our configured rules)Approved Automatically / Extract percent less than 10 – Auto approval

Please see this blog post for detailed info from our developer: https://developers.exlibrisgroup.com/forums/topic/citation-notes-and-tags/

Physical (print) and electronic (ebook) availability cannot be added as columns in these Analytics subject areas. This would be hugely beneficial for most of our daily reports and workflows as we try to ensure that a certain number of copies or electronic versions are available for resources added to reading lists.

An additional requirement is for availability to be shown for records related to the citation. This is because we have separate title records for physical (print) holdings and electronic (ebook) portfolios, and use the related_records parameter in Leganto Customer Settings to display availability for all available formats at citation level.