January 2019 Release - Harvard Highlights

Owned by William Walsh
Last updated: Jan 07, 2019 by Corinna Baksik
7 min read

Ex Libris Documentation

Harvard Alma Working Groups have summarized key changes below.  A full list of changes for the release can be found in the official Ex Libris Release Notes:

https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Alma/Release_Notes/009_2019/Alma_2019_Release_Notes?mon=201901BASE


Ex Libris Identity Service for Alma shared logins - (Note this change does not affect the majority of Alma users who authenticate via Harvard Key.)

  • All Alma North American customers will be migrated to this service on January 27, 2019.  As a result, internally authenticated users (e.g., student circulation desk workers) will be prompted to change their password on first login after that date. 

  • The following password considerations will be in place:

    • The password strength cannot be configured. 
    • The password does not have an expiry date.
    • The password locks for 30 minutes after five unsuccessful login attempts. 

Analytics & Reporting

Enhancements

  • The PO Line Inventory Library Code field was added to Funds Expenditure > PO Line. It displays the code of the library of the ordered inventory.

  • Bibliographic and holdings fields eligible for mapping to Local Params in Analytics was limited to 9XX. This has been changed. Bibliographic and holdings Local Params can now be mapped from any field in the corresponding MARC record. Note that Harvard has requested the following new mappings in Physical Items > Holding Details. See https://harvardwiki.atlassian.net/wiki/x/RoWUAg for a full list of Local Params in Analytics 
    • MARC field 583 mapped to Holding Local Param 08 (complete)
    • MARC field 966 mapped to Holding Local Param 09 (complete)
    • MARC field 843 mapped to Holding Local Param 10 (in process) 
  • The Title Author Combined and Normalized field was added to the Bibliographic Details folder in every subject area in which it appears. It displays 100 characters of the normalized title and the first four letters of the author.
  • In the Acquisitions dashboard, the Transaction Date Fiscal Year prompt was changed to Fiscal Year Description.
  • The following fields were added to Funds Expenditure > Fund Transactions and are useful for viewing trends and statistics on print as compared to electronic PO lines and expenditures.
    • Transaction Expenditure Amount of type Electronic Format
    • Transaction Expenditure Amount of type General Format
    • Transaction Expenditure Amount of type Physical Format
    • Number of POLs of type Electronic Format
    • Number of POLs of type General Format
    • Number of POLs of type Physical Format
    For a video explaining this feature, see Analyze Fund Expenditures by Physical or Electronic Types.
  • The Courtesy Notification Sent field was added to the Loan Details folder of the Fines and Fees and Fulfillment subject areas. It indicates whether a courtesy letter was sent to the patron concerning an overdue loan. This field contains data only from the beginning of July 2018.
  • The Invoice Line - Additional Information field was added to Funds Expenditure > Invoice Line.

Acquisitions/Finance

Enhancements

  • Removal of item search in Amazon - Removed from the Acquisitions > Advanced Tools menu due to problems with the Amazon integration. Ex Libris will explore possible enhancements of existing acquisitions workflows by integrating with Amazon APIs at a future date.

  • Delete interested users in closed POLs - A new configuration setting will allow entries to be automatically deleted. If implemented, a job will run weekly to delete users linked to closed or canceled PO lines.

  • Price Note added to invoice line - This is a new field available on the invoice line. Price Note appears on the Invoice Line Details page, in the Invoice Line List, and when the invoice lines are exported to a spreadsheet. The column is hidden by default in the Invoice Line List and can be added using the Manage Column Display button. 

Course Reserves/Leganto

Enhancements

  • Starting from this release, new citation titles include bibliographic record field 245 subfields a, n, p, h, b, f, g, k, and s.
  • You can now delete any alert directly from the Alerts tab on the Edit Reading List or Edit Citations pages.
  • Send List is now disabled if the instructor has not made any changes since the last time he or she selected the button. Changes that re-enable the button include: add, edit, or remove a citation, add or edit a public note, or add or remove a section or citation tag. Note that this feature only considers instructor activity beginning with this release; the button starts as active for all existing reading lists created before this release.
  • Selecting the Reading List - Citation with broken links task in the tasks list now opens the Edit Citations page with the Citation Link Reported as Broken alert pre-selected. In addition, when viewing a row with this this alert on the Edit Citations or Edit Reading List pages, the row now includes the hour (in addition to the date), the user who first reported the alert, how many people reported this link as broken (if more than one; the number appears in parentheses), the link URL (selectable if the link is a uResolver link), and a row action to delete the alert. The user name is anonymized six months after if it is first reported.
  • Leganto UI: You can now expand/contract the right pane by selecting the expand/contract icon at the bottom of the pane

Resolved

  • When adding an electronic book to a reading list in Alma, the book title became the citation chapter title and the platform became the citation book title. This was fixed.
  • Leganto Course Operators could not find lists not associated to courses. This was fixed. In addition, for some institutions, Leganto Course Operators could not see the Publication Status filter on the Find Lists page. This was fixed.
  • The course code text was cut off and separated from the icon in the Find Lists tab when using Firefox. This was fixed.
  • An unnecessary semicolon was added before the additional person name in the reading list page when the citation included chapter author. This was fixed.
  • When searching for reading lists on the Find Lists page, the course code filter did not consider searchable IDs. This was fixed.
  • When navigating between citations using the arrows, the holdings information from one citation appeared in the next citation. This was fixed.
  • A reading list collaborator could associate a list to multiple course even when multiple courses was not enabled. This was fixed.
  • Part of the citation menu was not visible for the last citation in a reading list. This was fixed.

Fulfillment

Enhancements

  • Circulation desks can now be easily set up with multiple printers. When connecting to the circulation desk, users are then able to choose the desk’s printer that they would like to use.  Note, requires local configuration.  Circulation units were surveyed in December for information needed for this configuration.  LTS will be in contact with circulation units to test additional printers for units that provided information.
  • When an item is scanned in a location other than its owning library and is being reshelved due to the Reshelve Without Transit rule, the destination field in the scan-in result now includes the owning library in addition to the location. For example, Reshelve to Main - Stacks (STACK).

  • On the Requests Monitoring page, the values of the pickup location and owning library facets will be now sorted alphabetically.

Resolved

  • On the Resource Request Monitoring page, in the Request/Process Type facet, library level work order types were shown by work order code for library-level work orders instead of by name. This was fixed.
  • The status date of a user's fees did not always update when the fees were waived. This was fixed.

Resource Management

Enhancements

  • The total counts in your search results are now precise and not approximate.
  • The following new match profiles are now available:
    • Title Statement Extended Fuzzy Non-Serial Match Method (key: com.exlibris.repository.mms.match.TitleStatementExtendedCDLMatchingProfile)
    • Title Statement Extended Fuzzy Serial Match Method (key: com.exlibris.repository.mms.match.TitleStatementExtendedCDLSeMatchingProfile)
    These profiles have the same functionality as the Extended Fuzzy Non-Serial Match Method and Extended Fuzzy Serial Match Method profiles, except that when matching against the title, the new profiles match only by 245 abknp and 880 (of 245) abknp and not by 245 abknp, 245a, 210a, 246a (and their 880), (which the Extended Fuzzy Non-Serial Match Method and Extended Fuzzy Serial Match Method profiles do).
    For more information, see Match Methods – Explanations and Examples.
  • Until now, when an item was in a temporary location, the enrichment fields were not published in the publishing output file when using the Primo publishing profile. From now on, any subfields that are added to the enrichment section are published with the record even if the item is in a temporary location.

Resolved

  • When importing a profile, the Originating system field of the existing record was overridden. This was fixed, and the Originating system field of the existing record is no longer overridden upon import.
  • The message displayed when changing the information of items with requests was changed to clearly indicate that existing requests were deleted.
  • The Upload Electronic Holdings Job did not operate properly in some cases. This was fixed.
  • Holdings records were not displayed in the correct sort order in the repository search. This was corrected.
  • Items on loan were erroneously deleted (when withdrawing multiple items at once from the items list). This was fixed.
  • An error message appeared when relinking an item associated with a closed PO line. This was fixed.
  • Alma did not operate correctly when activating a portfolio from the Community Zone when there was already a local bibliographic record in Alma. This was fixed.
  • Portfolios could not be moved from one collection to another. This was fixed.
  • The Identifier column in the Community Zone Updates Task List included only ISSNs from the 776$x field. This was fixed.
  • There was an error when editing a standalone portfolio linked to the Community Zone. This was fixed.
  • For some electronic collections, an error appeared when trying to open the Edit Collection > General tab. This was fixed.
  • Information in serial and monograph collections was switched by the Upload Electronic Holdings job. This was fixed.
  • When publishing to Primo, the $$2 GND subfield was erroneously added to some fields. This was fixed.
  • Sorting community results by contributing institution caused errors. This was fixed.
  • Alma operated slowly when working on electronic collections. To improve speed, when the customer is working on more than 100 portfolios (instead of the previous 1000), changes are done by a background job.
  • Bibliographic records for print serials did not appear in Alma. This was fixed.
  • In the MD Editor, when using F3 on a MARC 21 bibliographic record in a 7XX field, subfield $$i was taken into consideration when doing a search. This was fixed.
  • When editing field 260 $$a in the MD Editor, the pop-up displayed incorrect information. This was fixed.
  • The results for Browse Shelf Listing and Browse Bib Headings were not sorted, when using Control Number shelving scheme. This was fixed.
  • When using the Resources > Cataloging > Browse Shelf Listing and the Library and Location parameters were not specified, the back button (<) occasionally displayed inaccurate results. This was fixed.
  • The Rules tab in the MD Editor loaded slowly. This was fixed.
  • Adding controlled vocabulary values did not work properly when adding fields from a template. This was fixed.
  • Using F-3 while the field had a subfield i broke the link to the authority record. This was fixed.
  • Searching for headings that contained an apostrophe in the Authority Control Task List did not work properly. This was fixed.
  • When searching an authority record, bibliographic headings pages did not display properly. This was fixed.
  • When a non-existing location was mistakenly saved as the default location in the Inventory Information tab of an import profile, the profile did not display correctly. This was fixed.
  • After an import job, the 003 field was deleted incorrectly. This was fixed.