Oct 2019 ULMS Update

Created by brandon dudley (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Nov 04, 2019
6 min read

Project Management

  • Met with Ex Libris executives on Thursday, Oct 4, to update us on customer support, ExL strategic initiatives and further adoption of Ex Libris products.

  • ExL Support manager Brian Noone held a webinar on Friday, Oct 5, regarding changes in their support organization and improvements in their internal workflow. Recording of the meeting is available and the link was sent out over email.

  • There will be a kickoff meeting in Minnesota at the end of the month for the next-gen resource sharing product, Rapido. Five CSU campuses are participating as development partners and representatives from these campuses as well as the CO will be in attendance.

  • Surveys were sent out on Monday, Oct 14 to all CSU library staff, and separately to the chairs of the working groups and to the deans. The intent of these surveys is to gather a holistic view of our satisfaction with Alma and Primo and identify major issues to discuss with Ex Libris during the upcoming contract renewal in the summer. Your feedback is invaluable in building this systemwide view, so please take the time to complete your individual survey and respond to any requests that the chairs may make in your areas of interest.

Analytics

Working Group

  • The Analytics and Assessment Functional Committee will meet Wednesday Oct 9 to discuss task force assignments and deliverables.

  • Analytics FC members identified a coding error in the XML output of the patron load processing scripts resulting in display issues in Alma patron statistical categories. A fix was forwarded to David to take to CO CMS group.



Resource Management

Working Group

  • Committee member Lia Ryland presented “Using Python to Edit/Populate Enumeration” at the Tech Services Open Forum on Oct 10.

  • NACO funnel project update- Samuel (NACO funnel project coordinator), Israel, and Luiz are working on a way for CSU campuses with authority control needs, but no funnel project participants, to submit name authority record requests.

  • LCSH topical heading Illegal aliens. In 2016 the Library of Congress decided to cancel/revise this term. The House of Representatives then ordered LC to continue using the term. Recently, a call went out from the ALCTS Subject Analysis Committee to libraries and consortiums asking whether any of us have sought any local alternatives. This call prompted conversations within our consortium. Luiz and Israel have prepared some options for potential approaches. Luiz presented these options at the Oct 10 TS Open Forum.



Acquisitions & ERM

Chancellor’s Office

  • Updated the NZ Licenses in Alma with the July FY 19-20 renewals. All but four are complete in the NZ. Libraries should see the new FY 19-20 cost in the license link in their local Purchase Orders for the Opt-in resources.

  • Add User Limits to the e-book collections in the NZ so that the public notes was consistent across the different e-book collections. There are public notes for user limits at the collection-level or the portfolio-level depending on the user limits for the e-collection.

    • Creating a new e-book document on the wiki with the standardized message for e-book user limits.

    • Going to do a Tech Service Open Forum presentation on the notes, where they are and how to update them if it is at the portfolio-level.

Working Groups

Acquisitions:

  • We are fine tuning the Open Forum “Alma to PeopleSoft Financial Integration”

  • We will review independently the “Getting Started Doc” that was created last year. We have a separate google doc for notes. This will be an ongoing process that will take us some time.



ERM:

  • Doing an inventory of all the information that is out there on all our various channels.

  • The group is looking at VPATs (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template) for electronic collections.

  • Working with Acquisitions Committee on the current ACQ/ERM Getting Started document. May split the document into two separate documents.

  • Working through the ERM documents on Confluence. Updating or archiving the original ERM Task Force procedures and policies.

  • Discussing possible impact of CDI on electronic resources in Alma, specifically the NZ since there is currently no central PCI.

  • Discussed using a standardized format for the user limit note on e-books.

Resource Sharing

Chancellor’s Office

  • Worked with Natalya Magazino (San Marcos) to create a new analytics report that locates requests that finds shipped resource sharing borrowing requests that were completed but never received at the lending institution.

  • Figured out that patron-cancelled requests were folded into the report above which renders the report mostly useless. There were other problems with the patron cancellation workflow identified by the RSFC so I submitted a case to Ex Libris outlining the problems we’re having and proposed changes to the workflow.

  • Updated filters and criteria used for select NZ Filled/Unfilled CSU+ analytics reports and publicized the change to update saved personal copies of the report.

  • Contacted SUNY and Orbis Cascade Alliance about their use of the resource sharing request cleanup job to figure out whether or not we should be using the job. Working with Natalya to determine impact on analytics.

  • Shut off/restored CSU+ lending at campuses that lost power.

  • Coordinating in-person kick off meeting attendance for Resource Sharing development partners

  • Conducting informational interviews with Fullerton and San Marcos to learn about critical features of ILLiad to bring into Dev Partner discussions.

 

Working Group

  • I-SPIE TV episodes

    • Publicized a workflow for dealing with Long Overdue CSU+ loans. Mallory did a study and found that after 90 days overdue a CSU+ loan is extremely unlikely to be returned. The goal is to inform Collections Development so that they can repurchase the book if so desired. The next phase in this project is to connect with the Resource Management Functional Committee to discuss the best workflow for replacing these books while still holding the borrowing patron responsible.

    • Revived the discussion about CalState Walkin users. Fulfilment Network (Alma’s pickup and return anywhere system) will not work for CSU+, so we are exploring alternatives. Looking into developing some kind of webform solution to CalState Walkins using CSU+. There is a document that discusses the issues and need for Walkins that has not officially been released. Will follow up with the ULMS Steering Committee for review and comment.

  • Currently exploring an Alma job that would clean up Resource Sharing request queues of old transactions. However, running the job may have negative consequences for Network Zone analytics. We are still currently exploring whether we should recommend campuses turn on the job or not.

  • We did a release testing session on recently released Resource Sharing functionality called “Reactivate Request.” During the testing session we noticed that parts of the Alma manual resource sharing request functionality is not working properly, which halted testing. We opened a Salesforce support case about the issue. Testing will resume when case is resolved (or maybe earlier if we find a workaround).

  • Developed a new analytics report that should find items that were Completed but never Received (these are items that “Reactivate Request” functionality would be good for). There was an issue with the report generating some false positives so we are working on weeding those out if possible.



Fulfillment

Chancellor’s Office

  • Worked with Matthew Prutsman (LA) to test and publicize Hold Shelf reminder job

  • Seeking Chancellor’s Office feedback regarding the details of data retention policy specifically in relation to library circulation data.

  • Collecting specific use cases and examples for resource sharing letter editing. Sending them to Kevin for use at the open forum.

Working Group

  • The date for the next open forum has been moved back to 11/7 to allow for full participation by the functional committee members and to allow for more time to work on Letter/Notices templates. The topics will include discussing the pros and cons of Anonymization and the steps to take to enable the feature. Other topics will include release highlights over the last few releases, as well as purging users and Letter/Notices.

  • There had been a few campuses mentioning that they had patrons with role expiration dates. This was usually a function of manual record creation, but a report was put in the Institutional Analytics Verified folder to allow campuses to check if they have any patrons with expiring roles. This includes staff within Alma that might have expiring roles(Shared Folders -> Community -> Reports -> Institutions -> CalState -> Fulfillment -> Verified Reports -> Users). Another report that was put in the unverified folder for further testing was one which produces all patron records with purge dates (Shared Folders -> Community -> Reports -> Institutions -> CalState -> Fulfillment -> Unverified Reports -> Users).

  • Course Reserves Environmental Scan interviews are ongoing. There have been 7 campuses interviewed so far with 4 more scheduled over the next 2 weeks. Last week’s meeting minutes will show some of the highlights from these conversations. The goal is to produce a report highlighting the unique practices of the Course Reserves units and make recommendations for best practices.



Discovery

Chancellor’s Office

  • Zach Williams from Pomona has been furiously working on bug fixes on the custom UResolver. Chancellor’s Office is currently conducting a review of the code and testing. We’ll soon be releasing the next update for Sandbox

Working Group

  • Discovery is planning an Open Forum for the end of the months, details forthcoming