Pre-Order Searching

Owned by Jaime (she/her/hers) McAllister-Grande (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Jun 06, 2019 by Jennifer Koerber (Unlicensed)

Pre-Order Searching

There are various ways to see whether an order exists for a title and/or whether a title exists in our collection. It is important to note, that different approaches to searching (i.e. searching a Title search vs an Item search vs an Order line search) provide different data fields in the Alma results screens. Different search indices are also provided depending on whether you use the Basic or Advanced Search.

For a detailed explanations of terms, see Purchase Orders, Lines, and Owners


All Titles Search

  • An All Titles search will find all bibliographic records matching the search criteria, physical and electronic, whether they have holdings/items or portfolios/collections or not
  • Results can be sorted by different information, such as Title, Creator, and Publication date
  • Each search result shows Holding, Item, and Order information, if present: the shopping cart icon indicates how many Orders are associated with this record


  • Clicking on the number of orders opens up the Purchase Order Line List view, which provides a summary of the order including the status, vendor, fund, etc.

Purchase Order Lines List

  • To view and open the order, click on the order number in the Order line field at the bottom of the display
  • To edit the order, click on the Edit button in the upper right-hand corner of the display
  • PO Line Owner = the library or unit who placed the order
  • Copies = the library named in the holdings record or item record
  • Note that in the example above, both the PO line owner and holding library are the same; but is not always true, especially for Shared Services units:
     
  • If the order is for an electronic title, the Copies field will be blank because in Alma, electronic titles do not have inventory (a holding or item record)
  • The Purchase Order Lines list display also indicates the status of both the order (PO) and the Order line (POL) 
  • To see the full list of POL Statuses, see: POL Statuses (Both O&C) (TtT)

 

Creating a New Order for an Existing Record

To create an order for an existing record on the titles search results screen, click on the row action item list icon (ellipsis) in the upper right hand corner, and choose Order

If you frequently order items, you can customize the "hot buttons" on the right of your results screen to always display Order. See Customizing the Search Results Display for more details.


Search External Resources

If the item is not immediately findable in the Harvard repository, the next step would be to Search External Resources (z39.50 search).


  1. Go to Resources  >> Search External Resources
  2. This will open the Metadata Editor
  3. In the Search Cataloging Profile box, select where you’re going to search
    1. There is a pre-defined option for pre-order searching: HVD + OCLC + LOC (Pre-order searching). Choose this to quickly search the Harvard repository, OCLC/Worldcat, and Library of Congress.
  4. Enter as may criteria as you have to search on
  5. If needed, limit the search by clicking Refine Search and adding more search terms
  6. Once we locate the record we want, we’ll click Import and bring the bib record into Alma
  7. In the icon menu, click on the shopping cart icon to place an order
  8. Continue with the ordering process

For more details on this feature, read the Search External Resources documentation.