January 2021 Release - Harvard Highlights

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/2021/Alma_2021_Release_Notes?mon=202101BASE
• https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Leganto/Release_Notes/2021/Leganto_2021_Release_Notes?mon=202101BASE

General Enhancements

• A reminder that the new Alma menu layout will be the default for all users (with no opt out available) with the March 2021 release.

Analytics & Reporting

Enhancements

• Proquest Purchase Model field was added to E-Inventory > Portfolio. It contains information for both single institutions and multi-institution implementations. Possible vales are:
  
  • Subscription
  • DDA
  • Owned
• The following fields were added to Usage Data > Usage Data Details - Release 5 to display information for IR R5 COUNTER reports:
  • IR - Total Item Requests
  • IR - Unique Item Requests
  • IR - Total Item Investigations
  • IR - Unique Item Investigations
  • IR - No License
  • IR - Limit Exceeded
  • IR_A1 - Unique Item Requests
  • IR_A1 - Total Item Requests
  • IR_M1 - Total Item Requests

Resolved

• Primo Analytics Widgets were not selectable in the 'Manage Widgets' function on the Alma homepage. This was fixed.
• Data Visualization projects could not be saved to a shared folder. This was fixed.
• An unexpected error occurred when the 'Holding Lifecycle' and 'Fund Information' attributes were used together. This was fixed.
• In the Titles subject area of Analytics, the field 'Material Type code' was missing under the 'Bibliographic Details' folder. This was fixed.

Acquisitions/Finance

Enhancements

• The summary section in the Fund and Ledger screen has been moved from the right side to the top of the page.
  

• Note that upcoming releases will include technical upgrades to the PO line infrastructure to improve performance that will not result in functional changes.

Course Reserves/Leganto

Enhancements

• Automatically Calculate Total Chapter Count: In the Copyright Attributes tab of a Reading List Citation, the Total Chapters Count is now automatically calculated from the Required Chapters field. The calculation is performed only if Required Chapters contains numbers, Roman numerals, '-' or ','. You can override the automatically calculated value by typing over the number.

• On the Edit Item and Create Item forms, you can now add or edit Public Notes, Due Dates, and the Citation Visibility Dates (Display Citation and Display Materials dates). 

• You can now create an email to remind instructors to create lists for courses. The email can be launched from the Courses list via the new row action, Leganto create list - reminder email.

• Students can now sign in to RefWorks with their user name and password in order to export citations to RefWorks.  

Resolved

• In the Links & Availability section of Leganto, when the link contained a hyphen, it was truncated at the hyphen. This was fixed.
• In the Physical Items Subject Area and Course Reserves area of Analytics, the Active Course Code and Active Course Name fields appeared empty for several courses that were in Active status. This was fixed.
  

E-Resources

Enhancements

• Community Zone Updates - Remove Bibliographic Records With No Inventory - When a Community Zone portfolio was updated to relink to a different bibliographic record, the Community Zone Update process updated the Institution Zone portfolio to point to the new bibliographic record, but the old bibliographic record remained in the Institution Zone, even if it had no inventory. Now if the bibliographic record does not have inventory, the Community Zone Update process removes it. The Community Zone Task includes a dedicated report type for these updates: Portfolio bibliographic record updated.

• Collections of Type ‘Search Rights in CDI: Subscription’ Require Activation - Collections that are defined as ‘Search Rights in CDI: Subscription’ can only be activated for search in CDI if your institution subscribes to the collection. With this release, we can indicate we have a subscription for these collections by activating them in Alma or setting them up as Full text in CDI Only. It is no longer possible to use Activate for Search in CDI.

Fulfillment

Enhancements

• Institutions now have the ability to configure that the circulation desk does not display the Override return date and time field in the 'Return Items' page.Previously, this field was displayed at all times and scenarios for user roles where this was enabled, because the field was not associated to any circulation desk configuration. Institutions now have control and can limit the appearance of the field.
  

Resolved

• Auto-renewing loans for a patron record with an expiry date would send the patron a courtesy notification. The 'Notifications - Send Courtesy Notices and Handle Loan Renewals' Job Report marked these loans as 'loans not renewed' with the error message: 'The due date is already set to the renewed due date.' This has been fixed so that the Auto-Renewal job takes into consideration the current date and calculates if the library is open and if the patron's record doesn't expire before the new due date.
• Very poor response times when using Fulfillment. To compensate, performance improvements have been implemented for loan item actions.
• Performance improvements were done in the request recalculation process. This will improve the performance of circulation actions that trigger request recalculation such as loan/return/scan in, especially in cases where the scanned title has many items and many requests.

Resource Management

Enhancements

• New Metadata Editor
  
  • Template Management - Watch the Ex Libris video (approximately 2 and 1/2 minutes).
  • Search Resources - You can now view the target record side-by-side with an existing record.
  • The three functional areas of the MDE–Records, Templates, and Rules–are now located on the Navigation pane as tabs, and not as a dropdown.
    
    
    
    

• Changes to the Inventory Information Tab of Import Profiles

  • For Physical Mapping, there is now always an Item information field. If used, it populates the field parameters with this value. Leave blank to populate these individually.
    
     
    
    

  • In addition, the Basic/Advanced Mapping Policy radio buttons have been removed. All choices now display by default.