Data Sharing Profile

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To configure the data sharing profile, you must have one of the following roles:

General System Administrator

Overview

Emerging technologies have offered libraries and librarians new ways and methods to assess their resources and services to support data-driven decisions. Today’s ability to analyze information across libraries provides a tremendous opportunity to provide all participating libraries new insights and knowledge. Ex Libris is strongly committed to maintaining data privacy and confidentiality in providing libraries with access to advanced assessment and community data analysis needed by libraries to enhance their services and identify changing patterns in user needs.

Frequently Asked Questions

What data is included if you opt-in?

Title level holdings, non-identifiable fulfillment and reading list statistics will be included. The data will be anonymized. There will be no way to identify the source of the anonymized data (i.e. the institution or any individual).

Will personal or financial data be included?

No personal data of any kind or financial data (funds, orders, invoices etc.) are included in these new analytical capabilities.

Will user data be included?

Individual users' information--personally identifiable or otherwise--is not part of the data used. For example, usage information comes in the form of loan or electronic access count, wholly decoupled from user information.

How will my institution data be anonymized?

Your institution's data will be anonymized prior to being included with similar data from other participating institutions. This includes obscuring all information linked to your institution, including institution codes and identifiers.

If I include data will I be getting ads to purchase resources from ProQuest?

No. The anonymization of the data ensures the participating institution could not be identified or approached in any way.

Once I've opted-in, can I opt-out?

Yes. You can opt-out at any time. Should you withdraw from including your data, all your data will be removed from the community data and from the Collection Development and Selection analysis.

In a consortium with a Network Zone, if one institution opts in, is there a potential to inadvertently allow access to all of the network members' data?

NO. When an institution opts in and agrees to share their data, only the specific institution data is shared, not the network's institution or any network member.

Data Sharing Profile

Resource Sharing

Resource Sharing enables institutions to shareholding information for resource sharing purposes. When set to Yes, this indicates that the institution has agreed to share its information. The default setting for this option is No. We strongly recommend setting this option to Yes.

Recommendations

This service, known as DARA, generates recommendations for your institution to improve efficiency, reduce cost and overhead, and get more out of Alma. The recommendations are produced, among other ways, by comparing your anonymized data to the data of other institutions. To enable Recommendations, you must select Yes to the Recommendations question. You can choose to not have your anonymized data used for creating recommendations by selecting No to the Recommendations question.

For more information about DARA, see DARA – Data Analysis Recommendation Assistant.

Benchmark Analytics

Benchmark Analytics enables you to create analytics reports comparing the performance of your institution to similar institutions. To do this, Alma collects the anonymized data from your institution. To enable Benchmark Analytics, you must select Yes to the Benchmark Analytics question. To disable Benchmark analytics, select No. Answer the questions under the General section on this page to create a profile of your institution that Alma uses to identify other institutions like yours with which to conduct the comparison and provide relevant information.

If you confirm the use of the anonymized statistical data, all statistical data is anonymized and aggregated and contains no personal data or detailed transaction data. There is no way of identifying this data per institution. No identifiable personal or financial data of any kind (funds, orders, invoices, fines, and fees, etc.) is included in Benchmark Analytics. If you do not allow your anonymized statistical data to be aggregated, you will not see any statistical data in Alma Benchmark Analytics.

If you agree to allow your anonymized statistical data to be aggregated and at a future time you decide to no longer allow your anonymized statistical data to be aggregated, within one month your anonymized statistical data will be removed, and you will no longer see any statistical data in Alma Benchmark Analytics If you do not agree to allow your anonymized statistical data to be aggregated and at a future time you decide to allow your anonymized statistical data to be aggregated, within one month your anonymized statistical data will be added, and you will be able to take advantage of Alma Benchmark Analytics.

The aggregated and anonymized statistical data will be used only within the same regional data center as the institution and will not be transferred outside the data center.
It is not possible to create Alma Benchmark Analytics reports across regional data centers.
Institutions that are live with Alma for less than a year and have agreed to share their anonymized statistical data can use and take advantage of Alma Benchmark Analytics, but their own data is not shared. Alma Benchmark Analytics only includes data that is at least one year old to maintain proper statistical formulas.

Configuration

Configure the data sharing services from Configuration > General > General Configuration > Data Sharing Profile.