Create brand new courses during rollover
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.