As you go through your Alma configuration settings, you can consider the following tips & tricks that may aid your workflows in Alma.
- Under Fulfillment Configuration | Physical Fulfillment | Overdue and Lost Loan Profile, set the Library setting to the blank entry for each of your profiles:
Notices are sent based on the item's current library. Unless you have a strong reason to set up separate Overdue and Lost Loan profiles for different libraries, you will ensure that notices are sent for all items within one profile by setting the Library field to the blank entry. In order for notices to be sent for items at a particular Library, the Library must be listed in an Overdue and Lost Loan profile, or this field must be set to the blank entry. You can set up a pop-up message to alert you that the due date for a loan has been shortened due to the user's expiration date. Configure this under Fulfillment Configuration | Configuration Menu | General | Other Settings | and set shortened_due_date_notifications to EMAIL or MESSAGE_EMAIL. View more details on this setting in the online help: Alerts for shortened due dates.
The pop-up alert will look like this:
All of the orders that you place in Alma will use the default acquisitions location that is set for the associated Library as the item's default location. Ensure that this location is set to the most useful default location by navigating to General Configuration | Configuration Menu | Add a Library or Edit Library Information | select the Libraries tab and select Actions | Edit for every Library that you will use for acquisitions in Alma. Ensure that the default location for acquisition is set to a useful location – something like your main book stacks.
In order for the Repository search results and the Metadata Editor for holdings to display the location name for items instead of only the location code, navigate to Resource Configuration | Configuration Menu | Library/Location Display and select Name or Code + Name:
Associate your acquisitions department with a circulation desk, so that acquisitions staff may receive items directly, without setting them in transit to the circulation desk. In order to streamline the receiving process, you can set up a circulation desk to fully function as an acquisition desk. This means that you will never need to use an ‘acquisitions desk’. Instead, all acquisitions staff will use the ‘circulation desk’ as their primary desk. The circulation desk effectively becomes a combined acquisitions desk and circulation desk. The procedure for how to set this up is here: Receiving In Process items in order to avoid In Transit. This procedure will allow you to avoid setting received items in transit at the point of receiving them. If you are a small library, or don't need to set items in transit after receiving them, this is a good configuration option.