Question

What is the difference between patron purging and Fulfillment anonymization?

Answer

Alma enables running two distinct types of processes:

1. Fulfillment anonymization – this process irreversibly breaks the links between the patrons and the loans, requests and fees
2. User purge – this cleans up the patron records, by removing personal information such as name and contact information (email, address).

This means that:

• If you only run the Fulfillment anonymization then there is no way to link any loan/request/fee to this user.

• If you only purge the user records then the system will still be able to say that a specific loan was made to a patron with a specific ID, although it will not know who that person is – it will not have name and address information about this user.

Purging use records using the ‘Keep Statistics’ option leaves the Primary ID as a name, in order to prevent corrupting Analytics reports in the Users SA. The reports many times assume there are names to users. They would be corrupt if thousands of users would have the same blank name. Using the Fulfillment anonymization processes, leaving this ID has no effect on the anonymiaztion of the loans, requests and fees.

User deletion is a tool for fully removing a user record from the system, for example if it has been created by mistake, or does not need to be retained for any analytic purpose. Indeed, this tool fully removes the user from the database. Ongoing cleanup of user records should be done using the purge process.

• Article last edited: 19-Apr-2019