Ex Libris Documentation

Harvard Alma working groups have summarized key updates below. See the Ex Libris monthly notes for complete details:

• Alma October 2021 Release Notes
• Leganto October 2021 Release Notes

General Enhancements

•  The old Metadata Editor will continue to be available to Harvard until performance issues with the new MDE are fixed.

•  Sort holdings by “physically at” location

  • When your "physically at" Alma setting is a circulation desk, holdings for your library will display first in lists of holdings. It will also show first in the library facet for Physical Items searches.

• See the Accessibility Improvements section of the release notes for details on accessibility enhancements to facets, date picker, records list, and tables.
  
  

Alma-D

Enhancement

• Patron waitlist management for controlled digital lending. 
• Copyright statements can be assigned to specific objects, to take precedence over the default statement for the Access Policy used for an object. 
• Access to digital objects can now be set to expire after a fixed date, or relative to an attribute of the file (e.g. X months after pub year). 
  
  

Analytics & Reporting

Enhancements

 Local Authorities subject area is now available in Alma Analytics. Using the Local Authorities subject area you can create reports and dashboards for Local Authority records that are defined locally in the institution.

Authority records are part of process that organizes bibliographic information to create uniformity in the names of people, topics, and places in a bibliographic record so that it is easy to search for the record in the repository. This creates a single, distinct spelling of a name (heading) or a term for each topic.

Each Authority record contains a subject, such as an author, topic, series, or corporation and a particular unique identifier or heading term which is then used consistently, uniquely, and unambiguously for all references to that subject.

You can use the Local Authorities subject area to answer the following types of business questions:

• How many local authority records are created, deleted, and revised on monthly and annual basis?
• How can I generate reports that allow counting authority records and listing the detail of these records, for example: by creator, date of creation or modification, heading type, etc.?
• Which bibliographic headings or records are linked to an individual authority record?
• Which authority records are not linked to any bib headings searchable authority RDA elements, for example, records that contain keyword from MARC tags 37X, 667, 670 and some local fields?

DARA subject area is now available in Alma Analytics. Using this subject area, you can create reports and dashboards concerning the use of the DARA recommendations received by your institution and can answer the following types of business questions:

• How many recommendations were used?
• How many recommendations were dismissed?
• What were the recommendations?
• What was the dismissal reason for the recommendation?
• Who made the changes to the recommendation?
• When was the recommendation created and when was it changed?

For more information, see DARA.

• Num of Recalled Requests field was added to Lending Requests > Lending Requests Details. It indicates the number of recalled lending requests.
• Invoice-Due Date field was added to Funds Expenditure > Invoice Line. It indicates the due date of the invoice.
• The following fields were added to Users > User Details:
  • Can't edit restricted users – indicates if the user can edit restricted user groups
  • Disable All Login Restrictions – indicates if the user has IP login restrictions disabled
• Irregularities across several subject areas, including typographical errors, inconsistencies between common fields, and missing fields were corrected.
• Borrowing Institution and Borrowing Library fields (Lending Requests > Lending Request Details) were renamed to Borrowing Library (Rapid ILL) and Borrowing Institution (Rapid ILL) to indicate that these fields are related exclusively to Rapid ILL.
• The following out-of-the-box Acquisitions reports were renamed:
  • P and E Expenditure Trends was renamed to P and E Expenditure Trends - last 8 quarters
  • Expenditure Trends for Physical and Electronic Resources was renamed to P and E Expenditure Trends
• Linked reports that open in a new window are a security risk and are no longer supported. If you have any such reports, you must change them to be either Embedded in Section or Link – Within the Dashboard:
  1. From the Compound View of the relevant report, select the Properties icon
  2. From the Display Results drop-down menu, select either Embedded in Section or Link – Within the Dashboard

Resolved

• Item Policy field (Physical Items > Physical Item Details) displayed a value of UNKNOWN instead of the correct value. This was fixed.
• An analytics scheduled report email contains no data. This was fixed.
• Fields from the Physical Items dimension were visible in the Purchase subject area when using a search. This was fixed.
• The possible values for E-Inventory > Column Vendor Interface > Available was 0 and 1. This was changed to ‘Yes‘ and ‘No‘.
• When a bibliographic record is deleted, the value of the Rep Lifecycle field was still Active. This was fixed.
• Renewals in the Borrowing Requests SA were being counted incorrectly. This was fixed.
• Adding the Bibliographic Details > Place of publication - Country field to a report produces incorrect results. This was fixed.
• The value of the Author field was truncated to 250 characters. This was fixed.
• The Full Inventory Indexing Job changed the value of the Holdings Record Creation Date field (Physical Items > Holding Details) to be incorrect. This was fixed.
• The values in the Users > Address field consist only of preferred address values and not all address values. This was fixed.
• Use of Receiving Operator in Physical Items in analytics displays no results. This was fixed.
  
  

Acquisitions/Finance

Enhancements

• Bind items already in a work order department - Alma now allows items in a work order department to be bound.

  • The original items/work orders will be deleted. 
  • Alma will attempt to move item-level requests from the items to be bound to the new item. If the new item cannot fulfill the request, it is canceled. 

Course Reserves/Leganto

Enhancements

• Instructors can now create Read and Respond assignments on course materials, requiring students to read and annotate PDF files as directed by the instructor. (LTI 1.3)

• Updated tag workflow: Previously, when adding or removing tags from a citation, a user selected the Add tag option, then selected or removed the tags, then selected SAVE. Now, users can select Add Tag and select the relevant tags, which are saved automatically.
• Leganto now includes an Initial Request for Review field which tracks the first time a list was sent to a library for review. Additionally, the Request for Review Date field was renamed Current Request for Review, and it displays the most recent date a list was sent for review. Both dates are reset when the list is copied, duplicated, or rolled over.

• When a user scrolls down in Leganto, the top panel is now hidden, providing more space on the screen for the reading list. The top panel reappears when scrolling back to the top.

• When an Alma Digital item is not available because the number of concurrent users has reached the limit, the brief view of the citation now displays Join the waitlist instead of View online. When selecting Join the waitlist for the resource, users can join the queue for the resource and will receive a notification when the item becomes viewable.

• Previously, when using Cite It! if the type was not recognized, the type Other was assigned. Now instead of Other, the type Website is assigned.

• Previously, Leganto recorded when a list status changed from draft to published. In this release, a new event was added to the Recent Changes tab (Fulfillment > Reading List) that also records when a list status changes from published back to draft.

• When enabled (Configuration > Leganto > Notifications - instructors > List status changed to draft), all those set to receive notifications will also receive a notification that a list was changed from published to draft. The default for this notification is disabled.

Resolved

• Improvements were made to the Accessibility menu in the user settings.

• Previously, when an operator with the role Course Reserves Manager with a library Scope opened the Reading Lists Task list, the Assigned to others tab was missing. This was fixed.
  
  

E-Resources

Enhancements

• CDI changes
  • The "Do not show as Full Text available in CDI even if active in Alma" checkbox on the CDI tab is now disabled for inactive electronic collections.
  • A searchable "Hybrid" value will be added where appropriate to CDI-related descriptive fields.
    
    
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• Ability to limit user permissions for electronic inventory by library - Although this feature is disabled, we now have the option to limit the ability to edit, delete, and activate/deactivate electronic collections and portfolios by library.
  • If enabled, no portfolio can be owned by a library different than the one defined at the electronic collection level. In addition, libraries defined at the portfolio level will be automatically removed, except where no library is defined at the electronic collection level.

Resolved

• SUSHI harvesting can fail when processing large files. When sending a request for 12 months, the tr_j4 report will now use the new "Customer Harvest" functionality with a period of two months.
  
  
  

Fulfillment

Enhancements

• Nothing to highlight this month.
  
  

Resource Management

Enhancements

• MDE  - when viewing the properties of a rule, the dialog box that opens is now larger and more user friendly. 

Resolved

• Prediction patterns in the holdings record fields 866 and 863 were missing subfield ‘i‘ when ‘next predicted items information‘ had Enumeration A. This was fixed.
• MARC21 OTB template of Books/Computer Files/Maps/Music, field 008 positions 7-11 had the year 2013. This was modified to the current year 2021.
• MDE
  • In long fields, the cursor location was not where text was added or deleted. This was fixed.
  • When the user was using the Holding form editor, the spinning wheel appeared and disappeared many times. This was fixed.
  • Templates were not sorted alphabetically after adding them to the display configuration. This was fixed.
  • The LDR of Holdings template for Continuing Resources had defects in it. This made the LDR tag incorrect. This was fixed.