Acquisitions & Finance Search Examples

Owned by Jennifer Koerber (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Mar 05, 2019
5 min read

 

For staff working at any step of the Acquisitions process – from selection to ordering to receiving to invoice management – knowing how to search for the different kinds of Acquisitions and financial information in Alma is vital.

The Finances Overview module of this course goes into great detail on how to search for orders, invoices, vendors, and funds, and read those records when you see them. In this video, we will quickly review the options for Acquisitions searches in the search bar, then move on to options under the main menu and in the Metadata Editor.

Using the Search Bar

There are five main Acquisitions-related search types in the persistent search bar:

  • Order Lines, for orders
  • Invoices
  • Vendors
  • Funds
  • Licenses, for eResource license information

Two of these – Order Lines and Licenses – have both a basic and advanced search option available. In addition to being able to search by multiple criteria at once, the advanced search also gives access to a larger list of criteria for nearly all the fields available in these records. For instance, in the Order Lines type, the advanced search includes Rush orders and the presence of Interested Users as criteria.

This is even more clear in the License search type: the basic search only has three criteria – License code, Licensor, and Name – but the advanced search has more licenses search fields and all of the License Terms to search on independently.

Finally, an advantage to using advanced search is that you’ll be presented with suggested search terms for some criteria, such as the License Terms for Course Packs, where you get Equals, and then Permitted, Prohibited, Silent, Uninterpreted, or Not Applicable.

For Funds and Vendors, you can search for specific records or leave the search term box blank to see all records. Notice that these searches default to 2 parameters or filters: Current FY and Active funds, because that's what people are most often looking for. You can see all available fiscal years by disabling those filters: click on the x inside the circle or click on Clear All, and now we can see all the fiscal years on the left.

In Funds, you can use the asterisk ( * ) wildcard to search for related funds. Unlike using the wildcard in materials searches, you can put it at the beginning or end of your search string.

  • If you start with the ledger (or Harvard TUB), you can insert an * at the end to see all funds under that TUB: 415*
  • If you just want to search a middle section of the fund code, put asterisks on both sides: *504013* to see everything related to Dumbarton Oaks.

Again, there are many other things you can do with searches with the search bar. Definitely check out the Finances Overview Module for more on that, where you will also go into details on what each of these records contains.

Finding Acquisitions Information via the Main Menu

Under the Acquisitions main area, you can get to lists of Vendors, Funds and Ledgers, or Licenses as well, to see all records for these types.

Under the Purchase Order Lines, Purchase Order, and Receiving and Invoicing sections, you have more options:

  • Review will show PO lines, POs, and Invoices that have a status of In Review.
  • Claim takes you to orders not received that might need to be claimed
  • Renew lets you renew continuous orders
  • Package (under Purchase Orders) shows PO lines ready to be packaged together into a PO
  • Approve takes you to a list of POs ready to be approved
  • Receive displays items waiting to be received by your location
  • Receiving Department Items displays items already received at your location and in process (but not on the shelf yet)

All of these elements will be covered in much more detail in later Acquisitions functional training.

We will take a look at the Receive list as an example of all of these lists. Go to Acquisitions, Receive, and I’m set at Acquisitions ITS 625 so I will get a master list of everything that is available to be received at ITS 625 (all 31...almost 32,000 of them). From here, I can filter by vendor, by owning library (who was it ordered for), by status, by Interested Users or Patron Requests; from here I can also see both One-Time and Continuous Orders materials that have yet to be received.

Pre-Order Searching

As part of the selection and ordering process, you might conduct pre-order searching to see if Harvard already has records for the item and/or to find a bib record to bring into Alma as part of the ordering process.

A good first step for this is to conduct an All Titles search to see if Harvard owns the title in any format, and if so, which libraries own it.

Second, if there isn’t a bib record in Alma that matches the title you’d like to order, you can Search External Resources (such as WorldCat, OCLC, and others) to find a record. This search is conducted in the Metadata Editor so you can immediately import and work with that record once you find it.

  1. Under Resources, find Search External Resources and click on it. This will open the Metadata Editor and present you with a search form.
  2. From the Search Cataloging Profile drop-down, select HVD + OCLC + LOC (Library of Congress). This profile was created to quickly search all three of these databases for bib records. You can do this instead of or in addition to using the persistent search bar as part of the pre-order search process. There are also the other cataloging profiles you can search as well.
  3. Now, for all of the relevant fields (or all of the fields for which you have information), choose whether you want to search by Phrase or by Keyword and type or paste in the terms to search for. (I will search by Creator, Contains Keywords, Jemesin.)
  4. When you’ve filled in all the fields you want, click Search at the bottom right.
  5. The results page will display three tabs: one for Harvard results, one for OCLC, and one for the Library of Congress. The number of results on that tab will only appear once you click on the tab. So, Harvard has 14 records by this author, and we won’t see what WorldCat or Library of Congress have until we click on those tabs.
    1. These are nested results: all Harvard hits will display on the first tab, but the second will only display records that are in OCLC and not in the Harvard repository, and the LOC tab will only display what’s not in OCLC or Harvard.

You can refine the search by going back, and you can move through the pages of results with the navigation.

Once you locate the record you want, you can View it to see what’s in it, or you can Import that bib into Alma and click on the shopping cart icon to begin the ordering process (which is covered in Acquisitions training). For more on working in the Metadata Editor, please watch the Cataloging module of this course.

More Information

In addition to this video, other Acquisitions-related searches are covered in the Acquisitions Overview module, in the Finance Overview module, and in the eResources Overview modules, as well as in various videos. You might also want to watch the Resource Management Searches video to see other ways to search for materials records.

And, of course, look at the Alma wiki and Ex Libris Knowledge Center for other sources of information.