Discover Alma Watch Parties - Notes

Video watch party #1 10/28/16

What is the community zone?

What is the difference between the “repository” in Alma vs the “knowledge Base” that is used for Primo.

What exactly is included in the “repository”

TODO: Create a “Definitions” list to describe all of the different vocabulary

Community Zone: with this collection, is ExLibris in a place to be competitive with OCLC for consortial borrowing WorldCat?

TODO: Send a list of libraries who are using Alma/Primo locally, Maybe share experiences?

Video watch party #2 11/3/16

Do links to other records open in a popup or new window?

Filter by fund code - did not appear in facets

Where do the vendor numbers come from? Do we create those or are they automatically generated?

Can we associate vendors with a consortial relationship? Some packages are bought through a consortium so both need to be included in conversation.

**License Management in Alma is new, something we don’t have currently in any of our systems. - Ingest will likely be a manual process after the implementation.

Trials feature might be useful for some things, but not sure about the surveying.

Within the department, Brian will also be having conversations about workflow with staff.

What are the things that absolutely have to be done by GoLive and what configurations can wait until later?

Video Watch Party #3 11/10/16

-Preferred browser?

- The control functions override functions and shortcuts that are available natively in the browser. So no control F to find things on the page? Can we customize the hot keys and the functions?

How do the records get into the editor to be there when a person logs in to begin with?

In the Metadata editor, the highlighting to indicate incorrect data - is it accessible?

What are the records matched on when the editor looks for matching records?

Law maintains duplicate bibliographic records - those will likely need to be combined.

What does Alma mean by “duplicate” record?

Japan also likely has a lot of duplicate bib records.

We can link to a community zone bib record and then create our own holdings and item record. Would this reduce our number of bib records?

If you have links to cz bib records, what happens if the originating institution leaves the cz or we leave?

We currently have COUTTS for shelf-ready items. They are part of ProQuest. How will that affect how we get bib records?

Workflow change: anything that does not need to be tracked in the iLS, shouldn’t be. For example, electronic resources or materials that are housed elsewhere - don’t need to also have a record in the ILS.

How will the link resolver work once its part of Alma instead of a separate solution like we have now. Its possible that the e-resources don’t touch the alma repository. We have to figure out how this will work together in the future for managing the e-resource records. We may just be able to bring the e-resources into discovery and bypass alma repository.

Are the 880 fields indexed with non-roman characters?

Video watch party #4 11/17/16

What is the difference between electronic titles and digital titles?

Do we have to pay extra for indexing or additional index lists?

Are “Print”, “electronic” and “Digital” different indexes? Are we maintaining different indexes for each of these?

Does the system come with any of the import tables? Or is that something that we have to add or import from  Millennium?

Who is authorized to add import profiles?

What is meant by the “Primary sort by Rank”? Is rank a relevancy ranking?

- Can we modify this algorithm for the ranking?

Can we modify the requesting options that are available on the records?

Can we configure the left facets on the staff view repository search?

Index:

- how does Alma handle MARC format updates similar to RDA and then the updated fields and indexes, etc?