February 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:

General Enhancements

Our Alma sandbox will be refreshed on February 14, 2021. If you are currently testing in sandbox, please record information about your test scenarios locally so you can recreate them post-refresh.
Accessibility improvements for keyboarding

Resolved issues

New Alma UI: On larger monitors or higher zoom levels, entered search terms may be obscured by the chosen search fields. This was fixed by adding a tooltip to fields and breaking the line inside the combo-box
Alma new layout: The Copy function did not appear for Generate Tracking ID. This was fixed.
New Layout: Alma Display Density set to big font size led to the current location not showing. This was fixed.

Analytics & Reporting

Enhancements

The following fields were added to the Fulfillment subject area:
- The Loans (Not In House) from Resource Sharing Borrowing Request field was added to the Loan dimension. It indicates the number of not in house loans that came from a resource sharing borrowing request.
- The Is Resource Sharing Borrowing Request Loan field was added to the Loan details dimension. It indicates if the loan was initiated by a resource sharing borrowing request.
Active for Fulltext In CDI field in E-Inventory > Electronic Collection was renamed to CDI-only full text activation to be consistent with the naming style of the other CDI fields.
The In CDI field in E-Inventory > Electronic Collection was renamed to CDI - Available for CDI search activation to better explain the purpose of the field.

Resolved

The 'is equal' operator did not work for the Invoice - Approval field (Funds Expenditure > Invoice Line). This was fixed.
A report to identify the number of Loans, Renewals, and Returns for a certain library during a time period sometimes returns incorrect values. This was fixed.
Sort is not working properly for null values. This was fixed.
Combined reports were not working. This was fixed.
Available for Group Members field (E-Inventory > Portfolio) was not populated when a cumulative field, such as No. of Portfolios (in Repository), was added to the report. This was fixed.

Acquisitions/Finance

Enhancements

View Invoice when Editing a PO Line - When editing a POL, invoice numbers on the Invoice Lines tab now link to the invoice, which will open in view mode.
See Orders Associated with Requests When Receiving Multiple Orders - When receiving POLs from the receiving workbench, the existing pop-up message was enhanced to be clearer about which specific POL(s) are associated with user requests.

Resolved

Deleting a fund (other than the first) from a POL with multiple funds caused a different fund to be deleted. This was fixed.

Course Reserves/Leganto

Enhancements

You can now create a set of courses from an uploaded file
Help page customization: You can now define customized help pages for Leganto. To configure this, access the Help Pages mapping table at Configuration Menu > Leganto > Features > Help Pages. Once configured, the Help menu in the Leganto interface will bring the user to the defined URL.
Update of text labels for links: The out-of-the-box terms LTI and Permalink were replaced in Leganto since instructors are often unfamiliar with these terms.
New filter menu in Leganto: The Leganto filters have changed from tabbed filters to a drop-down list.
The new display_in_process parameter (Configuration Menu > Leganto > Features > Leganto Features) allows you to hide the process status in Leganto. When set to false, the status is suppressed. When set to true, which is the default, the status is displayed.
You can now use multiple digital viewer services in Leganto.
If a user has instructor privileges for one course but is a student in a second course in the LMS (CMS), Leganto now recognizes this scenario and displays the CMS entry only if the user is the instructor of the course. This is controlled by a new parameter, display_cms_entry_by_cms_role. When set to true, the CMS entry page is displayed according to the role in the CMS. When set to false, the CMS entry page is displayed according to the Alma user role.
Two new parameters allow you to define when and to whom the value in the general_message parameter will display. The new general_message_dates parameter allows you to specify a date range when the value in the general_message parameter will display. The new general_message_role parameter allows you to specify that the value in the general_message parameter will display only for the user role indicated. Possible values are instructor, student, librarian, guest, or leave empty for the general message to display to all users.
The default_list_sort_instructors parameter (Configuration Menu > Leganto > List Management > Settings) now defaults to the list_updated value for the Citations list, meaning it is sorted by most recently updated.
Find lists by course year and term: Course year and course term are now available by default in the advanced search of Find list. You can define defaults in the Course Term drop-down list and in the Year field. You can edit these options in the Find List Settings table. If the course term is populated, it now appears in the List brief display.
Analytics:
- The Time and Date and Time fields were added to Leganto Student Usage > Event Date to display the date and time of the event
- Analytics now displays information about courses created from a learning management system using Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI). This information is available in the Leganto Instructor Usage Events subject area, under Instructor Usage Events. Create a Course from LTI is now one of the event types.
Citation actions are now available from the full view of a citation, allowing users to take action on citations without having to return to the list view. The action menu options are similar to those available from the reading list view.
- The menu options are: Copy to my collection, Send to library, Mark as done, Link from the course to here, Re-link from the course to here, Create a shareable Link, Export to RefWorks, and Set complete.

Resolved

When searching for citations with the Citation Available status, citations were incorrectly displayed with a status of Full Text Available. This was fixed.
In some cases newspapers links did not display in Leganto. This was fixed.
Moving a citation between sections with the arrow buttons made a citation disappear. This was fixed.
On the Find List page, after performing a search, the page did not scroll to the top, thus not displaying the first result on the page. This was fixed.

E-Resources

Enhancements

Associate a PO Line Created via the Import Profile to an Existing Portfolio - You can now associate a POL created via an EOD import profile to an existing portfolio, instead of creating a new one. A Locate Existing Resource checkbox has been added to the PO Line Information tab of EOD import profiles that are configured for electronic inventory.

Resolved

CZ search results for electronic collections sometimes displayed a black house and 'Service is Not Available' message, although the service was available in the IZ. This was fixed.
Static URL and Static URL (Override) fields in electronic portfolio replaced & with %26. This was fixed.

Fulfillment

Enhancements

RS Analytics: The following fields were added to the Fulfillment subject area:

The Loans (Not In House) from Resource Sharing Borrowing Request field was added to the Loan dimension. It indicates the number of not in house loans that came from a resource sharing borrowing request.
The Is Resource Sharing Borrowing Request Loan field was added to the Loan details dimension. It indicates if the loan was initiated by a resource sharing borrowing request.

Resolved

When cancelling a request from the Scan In Interface, the cancellation reasons did not appear on the Cancel Request pop-up window. This was fixed.
When an OpenURL request from Primo had no identifier, the genre was dissertation, and the source was Ebscohost, the genre was overwritten as unknown. This was fixed.
If an item was in department at a process, scanned in with no following requests and was designated to transit for reshelving, the description, call number and other fields were not displayed in the details of the items within the list. This was fixed.

Resource Management

Enhancements

New Hot Key for MDE: Alt+M - Press to toggle the Metadata Editor open/closed (applies to new MDE only)
New Batch tool to Merge Records and Combine Inventory under Resource Management > Advanced Tools. PLEASE DO NOT USE THIS FEATURE WITHOUT CONSULTING LTS. The input file required by this tool is generated by the Alma Duplicate Title Analysis tool. This Duplicate Title Analysis Tool should not be used for print resources as the matching has not been vetted. It does not check edition statements, etc.
Additional Fields for Inventory Import: mapping options are now available for these item fields: copy, provenance, magnetic, receiving date, expected date, pages, pieces, replacement cost
New MDE: additional of labels and tooltips to interface.

Resolved

In some cases, the MDE showed a partial linking icon instead of the full linking icon . During the February release, Ex Libris will run a data correction job that will fix the data, to align the data with the actual link in all these cases.
"Three missing resource types have been added to the Bibliographic Resource Type code table: 'Map - Microfiche', 'Map - Microfilm', and 'Map - Microopaque'. This enables Analytics to display the correct resource type for bibliographic records whose resource type is one of these.
In the New MD Editor when the user viewed versions for a record and the number of version was greater than 7, scrolling to the last one was not possible. This was fixed.
When adding a new field to a record and using Tab to navigate from indicators to field, the cursor was placed before the subfield delimiter, instead of skipping to after the subfield. This was fixed.
New MDE: When editing a record in Firefox, the cursor overlaped characters or appeared at the end of a line with space before it. This was fixed.
New MDE: quick link menu not visible when doing actions in new MDE. This was fixed.
Users working in the new MD Editor were experiencing slow response and performance. This was fixed.
MD Editor - Template properties: User for 'Last updated by' was not updating. This was fixed.

Alma Digital

Resolved

In the New Alma Viewer, the forward arrow did not work when viewing a PDF file. This was fixed.