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:
General enhancements
- Major change to feedback messages (pop-ups etc.) - All messages now appear in floating message panes on the side of the page. Messages are now coded by color and icon to indicate when they are a success, error, or information message. See Messages or see the video Improved Feedback Messages.
- Keep up with Alma widget - All Alma users will see a new widget, Keep Up With Alma, in the top left-hand corner of the Alma dashboard. This widget highlights new Alma features; you can move it to a different part of your dashboard or remove it entirely.
- New premium sandbox policy - The Alma sandbox will now be refreshed twice a year (in February and August) for all customers. (The initial refresh is scheduled for 2/10/19.) As a result of the new policy, the Sandbox Management page in the Configuration menu and the sandbox widget on the Alma home page were removed. Instead, in your production environment, there is now a link to your premium sandbox from the Help menu.
- Alt key elements/navigation - On any page that has one or more hot keys that start with Alt+, press the Alt key to see the elements that are selected and their corresponding keys. Also, use the hot keys Alt+1, Alt+2, ... Alt+N to open the nth tab on any page that has tabs. For this feature, press the Alt key, enter the number (multiple digits are supported, so you can enter Alt+10, for example), and release the Alt key to open the numbered tab.
Analytics & Reporting
Enhancements
- Cost Usage folder was added to the E-Inventory subject area. It enables you to create reports that display the cost per use for electronic resources. For more information, see Cost Usage
- Actual Shipped Format field was added to Lending Requests > Lending Request Details
- Fund Fiscal Period Filter field was added to Physical Items > Fund Information > Fund Fiscal Period and to Funds Expenditure > Fiscal Period. It indicates the filter on the fiscal period (Current fiscal period, Previous fiscal period, or Two fiscal periods ago)
- Campuses Name and Participants field was added to Leganto Student Usage > Courses. It displays the name of the campus with the participants in the course.
- Last Loan Date (In House) and Last Loan Date (Not In House) fields were added to Titles > Title Details
- The Fiscal Period Start End field was added to the following locations:
- E-inventory > Cost Usage > Fund Fiscal Period
- Funds Expenditure > Fiscal Period
- Physical Items > Fund Information > Fund Fiscal Period
- In all of the tabs of the the Title level overlap analysis dashboard, there is now an option to find title overlap by Title Author Combined and Normalized
Resolved
- Analytics was timing out too quickly. This was fixed.
- The Active Course Code and Active Course Name fields were not populated correctly in Analytics
- When an Alma Analytics report was created with MMS IDs of physical titles, usage statistics appeared for them. This was fixed.
Acquisitions/Finance
Enhancements
- Currencies without decimal point - For currencies such as the Japanese Yen that need to be presented without a decimal point, there is a new customer parameter to enable this formatting. See truncate_decimal_fraction_amount for more information.
- Receiving continuous items - To address a performance issue, when receiving is completed from the Continuous tab of the Receive New Material page, the user now returns to the list of PO lines on the Continuous tab rather than opening the Manage Items page.
Resolved
- When a PO line list was exported to Excel, the Interested users field always contained Has interested users, even if the PO line did not have any interested users. This was fixed. When the PO line does not have any interested users, the value is now No interested users found.
- Searching invoices by vendor account code caused an error. This was fixed.
- When a PO line was opened in view mode, the Save button was visible. When selected, the page failed with an exception. This was fixed and now the Save and Save as Template buttons do not appear on the page when it is opened in view mode.
Course Reserves/Leganto
Enhancements
- You can now remove a specific type of alert when removing alerts on the Edit Citations or Edit Reading List pages. See Removing Alerts.
- When enabled, you can now add a syllabus as a URL, a file, or both to a reading list in Leganto. If instructor rollover is enabled, then, when an instructor rolls over a list, the instructor can select whether to copy or delete (Reset) the syllabus.
- When enabled, you can disable links from appearing to students in the Links and Availability section for a citation. Librarians and instructors continue to see the disabled links. You can independently disable or enable (when available):
- Each electronic link
- The uploaded file
- The source URL, which is citation's web site
- Each digital representation
- All physical availability as a group; you cannot disable or enable specific holdings.
- You can configure how citations appear on the reading list page in Leganto in the Brief Citation Format mapping table. You can configure one or two rows to display each citation according to its material type. When a user views citations in compact view, only the first row appears.
- All mandatory fields in Leganto are now marked with a red asterisk.
- The default values on the Instructor Rollover Operations table (see Enabling Instructor Rollover) now affect both instructors and librarians (before, the values were only selected by default for instructors).
- When available, holdings information now appears for physical items returned by a Leganto search.
Resolved
- When MMS ID appeared as a column on the Edit Reading List page, selecting the citation title opened the incorrect citation. This was fixed.
- In some cases, a reading list with Complete status appeared in the Reading Lists Task List page as Ready for Processing. This was fixed.
- Facets did no appear on the Edit Reading List / Edit Citation pages for certain customers. This was fixed.
- Alma items added to Leganto My Collection from Primo did not contain links. This was fixed.
- The course creator and creation date in the info icon pane changed when the course was modified by a librarian in Alma. This was fixed.
- In some cases, the first references were missing when exporting a reading list to PDF. This was fixed.
- A citation's content type changed from Book Chapter to Book when manually creating the citation. This was fixed.
- Cite It! appeared on mobile devices, although it is not supported for mobile devices. Cite It! no longer appears on mobile devices.
- The librarian assigned to a reading list was not reset when an instructor duplicated or rolled over the list in Leganto. This was fixed.
- Sorting lists by course name or course code did not work as expected. This was fixed.
- Set Complete appeared as an action for a citation even in 1) student view and 2) when the list was locked. This was fixed.
E-Resources
Enhancements
- Upload electronic holdings from Springer - A new integration profile was added to Alma for automatically uploading holdings files from Springer for the following electronic collections: SpringerLink Journals - AutoHoldings and SpringerLink Books - AutoHoldings. See Upload Electronic Holdings from Springer for more information.
- Related portfolios - In the Electronic Portfolio Editor, a new Related Portfolios tab was added. From this tab, you can view and work with the other portfolios that are linked to the same bibliographic record. This provides an easy way to check what coverage may be available for the title across providers in addition to the coverage identified for the portfolio that you are editing. See Editing a Portfolio Using the Electronic Portfolio Editor for more information.
Fulfillment
Enhancements
- It is now possible to change the item information of an item that is on a hold shelf or on loan. The error message which previously blocked these actions was replaced with a warning pop-up that allows the user to continue with the change.
Resolved
- Past barcode searches appeared on the Manage Item Returns page. This was fixed
Resource Management
Enhancements
- There is a new condition syntax option, containsScript, for normalization and indication rules that can be used to check for a specific non-Latin script. See the Conditions section for more information.
Resolved
- 651 fields were linked correctly, but were not corrected as expected by the Preferred Term Correction job. This was fixed and now the 651 fields are corrected with the value of the corresponding 151 fields.
- When working with predicted items in the MD Editor, it was occasionally not possible to add the 863 field. This was fixed.
- Users were not able to edit the permanent location of a physical item with the Change Item Information job or the Physical Item Editor. This was fixed.
- When the bibliographic record that was connected to the portfolio being linked to the Community Zone contained a canceled ISBN (020$z) or a canceled ISSN (022$z), Alma attempted to find matches in the Community Zone to these invalid identifiers. This was fixed.
- In a repository search results, the date of publication was taken from the wrong field. This was fixed.
- In the browse shelf listing, when searching for alternative or temporary call numbers, browsing backwards and then browsing forwards caused inaccurate results to appear. This was fixed.
- Saving a MARC 21 holdings record without a 008 field added a 008 field with incorrect content. This was fixed, and now the content is taken from the default MARC 21 holdings template.
- In the MD Editor, when a user tried to load a new record into the left pane of the split screen, the record was loaded into both the left and right panes. This was fixed.
- In the MD Editor, when editing a MARC 21 authority record, using F3 on a 5XX field now removes the following subfields. They are preserved after selecting a result: 5XX subfield i, 500 and 510 subfield e, and 511 subfield j.