Page Comparison

This is the fourth section of the searching module of the Alma Overviews course. The video is at the top of the page, followed by the script.

In this video, you'll review:

Now, let’s look more closely at how you can tailor your search results display to what’s most important to you and your work needs. This is an optional step – the default settings are fine – but after you’ve used Alma for a while, you might find that moving certain information around in the display lets you work more efficiently.

In this segment, let’s do a quick Physical Items search by title, to get a list of item records in the search results.

Manage Your Display

To Manage Your Display, click on the gear next to the Export icon at the right. In this area... you can also click on Show All immediately to show all of your choices. In this area, you can choose how many columns you want to display and what information to display in each column, and in what order. You’re not deleting anything if you choose not to display it; you’re simply not displaying it in your Alma. You can undisplay or display items of information by clicking on the tickyboxes next to the title of the information.

You can change the order that fields display in by dragging the labels around. For instance, I’ve searched for item records, and to me, the barcode is the most important piece of information so I have it right at the top. I can drag it to the top of the first column and then I can add Permanent Physical Location and Status right after it.

For Staff Working With Physical Items

A recommendation for staff who work with physical items: it can be very helpful to have base Status and then Process Type right next to each other in the display column. This is good because they work together to tell you where an item is and what's going on with it. We’ll discuss this further in the Fulfillment, Work Orders, and RTL library staff modules of this course.

You could also move information from one column to another, if you wanted to. I could put Copy ID here, and I could put RFID Security Status over there.

Customizing the Row Action Items List

In the next area on the right are the action items we mentioned earlier. Here is where you choose which two actions appear as your “hot buttons” and which appear when you click on the ellipsis icon in the menu. Again, drag the actions up and down to move them around and display.

When you’re done customizing your results view, click on Save. When you customize a search results view, these changes will apply every time that you search for that type of record moving forward. You can search for a list of Physical Titles records and customize the view to have it display that way. Then you can do a Physical Items record display, and so on through each kind of search type that you work with.

The gear icon with a green dot indicates that your view is customized, so you’ll always know what you’ve customized and what you haven’t.