Question

Some user records fail to load in SIS. The error indicates that gender is unknown or invalid. 

Answer

Gender field is not mandatory. The structure however is strict. Possible values are Male, Female, None, Other.

In XML, the format is:

<gender desc="Female">FEMALE</gender>

<gender desc="Male">MALE</gender>

<gender desc="None">NONE</gender>

<gender desc="Other">OTHER</gender>

Please note this information, from the May 2025 Release Notes: 

As part of our GDPR compliance efforts and in order to improve the protection of private information on the Alma database, all gender information will be removed from the user records in Alma in the upcoming August release. Since gender is not essential for product functionality, retaining it poses unnecessary compliance risks according to GDPR requirements that personal data be collected and processed only when there is a clear legal basis and business need.

The deletion will not be reversible. From that point on, it will no longer be possible to input or retrieve gender information to the user record using any of the standard interfaces that concurrently update this record.

Note: 

The only effect will be that there will be no gender field to be updated, and the field will therefore be ignored if included in the input XML. All other information on the record will continue to be updated by the feed, and the records will not be rejected.

No change will be required on your SIS or API feeds.