What reporting and statistical options are available in Alma? 

How often is data exported from Alma to Alma Analytics?

Are all Alma fields included in Alma Analytics?

No, all Alma fields are not included in Alma Analytics. The decision to selectively include fields is based on several factors, including data governance and performance optimization. By curating the available fields, Alma Analytics ensures that users receive meaningful insights without compromising system performance.

• Data Governance:
  • Alma Analytics aims to provide meaningful insights to users. By selectively including relevant fields, the system ensures that reports and dashboards remain focused on essential information. For example, some fields in Alma can have multiple values or are hierarchical. Adding these fields to Analytics can result in complex data structures that are difficult to include in reports.
  • Adding all fields could introduce noise and clutter, making it harder for users to find the data they truly need.
• Performance Optimization:
  • Adding all fields to Analytics could burden the system with excessive data. This can impact performance, causing slowness and affecting the overall user experience.
  • By selectively choosing which fields to include, Alma ensures that the most valuable and relevant information is available in Analytics without compromising system performance.

You can request the addition of Alma fields to analytics in one of two ways:

• Idea Exchange: Submit your ideas for adding new fields to Alma Analytics through the Idea Exchange platform. This allows you to share your suggestions with the community and vote on ideas proposed by others. The Alma Product Team actively reviews and addresses highly voted ideas.
• Community of Practice: Customers can also engage with the Community of Practice, which maintains close collaboration with Alma Product teams. Regular communication ensures that customer feedback and needs are considered in product development.

In summary, Alma’s approach balances the need for comprehensive data with system performance considerations. By selectively adding fields, Alma ensures that Analytics remains efficient and provides valuable insights to users. Users can actively contribute to field selection through the Idea Exchange or engage with the Community of Practice.

How does Alma support reporting on activity in the library? 

 

What options are there for combining data elements for reporting?

Can SQL be used in creating reports?

Can Alma produce reports on all data held?

Can patron information be anonymized in analytic reports?

Fields that contain identifying information of users can be anonymized when creating Alma Analytics reports. Anonymizing this data allows the library to generate reports for statistics and trends without violating privacy concerns or local privacy-related laws.

If the parameter analytics_anonymize_user_details is set to true then when you create a report, fields that usually contain identifying information for users are left blank.

What documentation related to report creation is available?

Does Alma provide real time data reporting?

Reporting that is run from within the Alma interface, as opposed to using the Alma Analytics functionality is real time.  Alma Analytics is based on a data warehouse created from the online transaction databases and does not run any queries directly on the operational system. This means that there is no interference with the operations of the system.

Data is refreshed on a daily basis from the operational data into Alma Analytics.

Can Alma analyze trends in historical data?

Historical data can be analyzed in all areas such as electronic usage, physical usage (loans etc.) and expenditures as well as "cost per use".

Below are three screenshots showing:

• Overall electronic usage for the past two years by month.
• Electronic usage for which there has been an increase in usage in the past two years.
• Electronic usage for which there has been a decrease in usage in the past two years.

Can reports on cataloging activity be generated?

Alma contains an out of the box report called ‘Cataloger Activity’ which includes a table and graph of cataloger activity showing staff users and how many records they created, updated and deleted (top ten). The year filter is prompted.

Can Alma Analytics interface with other systems?

Alma Analytics can interface with other systems via the extensive APIs which can be used to retrieve data from Alma Analytics reports.

This can be with any other system by writing an app which runs the API which retrieves the Alma Analytics report and then using the retrieved data in an external system.

See for example the movie Alma Analytics: Using an API to integrate Alma Analytics with the Tableau Web Data Connector as well as the presentation Analytics - Using Alma Analytics with the Tableau Web Data Connector.pptx and the Tableau Web Data Connector Ex Libris Developers Network Blog

That's just one example of how an API can be used to integrate with another system (which in this case is Tableau).

See also

How to use an API to retrieve an Alma Analytics report in 5 easy steps

Alma Analytics APIs on the Developers Network

Is an analytics API supported?

The Analytics API returns an Alma report (in XML format only). This blog provides additional information on how to determine your reports' paths and how to apply pagination or filters.

Since Alma Analytics reports can be very large, Alma supports retrieving it in several parts: The first retrieval will return a Resumption Token as part of the OBI report. This token should be used as a parameter instead of the path parameter for the next retrievals in order to get the next rows. See here for more details. https://developers.exlibrisgroup.com...apis/analytics

Report Creation

 What domain aggregate functions does the solution support

 Question: What domain aggregate functions does the solution support (e.g., sum, count, min, max, etc.)?

Answer: All aggregate functions supported by OBI are supported by Alma Analytics.  See:

 

 

 

Are reports easy to create?

Creating a report is simple; after choosing the relevant subject area the staff user drags and drops relevant fields from the subject area on the left, to the right hand pane. Results can be viewed, and filters and other options can be applied in order to give the desired outcome. A graphic representation can be added, or chosen as the final report output.

Can the report output be sorted?

Alma Analytics provides sort mechanisms. You can directly sort columns ascending or descending:

How can NULL values be reported?

Analytics allows for special treatment related to the case of NULL values across all fields, making sure that data is always displayed even when a specific data is missing. In the example given below all items that have no location information will be displayed under “unknown”/”none” category:

The following is an example of a report output that has been filtered to display items that have an ‘unknown’ item policy:

 

Can a dashboard incorporating different report areas be generated?

Dashboards provide a useful tool for gathering a number of reports together for easy viewing. The dashboards can be tabbed so the user can navigate from one tab to the next in order to review report outputs. An example of a Vendor Expenditures dashboard can be seen following:

An example of a metrics dashboard with a variety of report outputs:

Is an audit trail generated on reports?

Each report is listed in its folder with a date stamp of the last modification stamp and the name of the owner. The name used may refer to the ID number of the staff member.

Can reports based on time stamps be generated?

Where appropriate date definitions are very flexible including date, day, month, week, quarter year and even time.

An example of this is the report below showing the number of loans by patron group within defined hour ranges.

Can Alma generate reports on the level of the title?

The Titles subject area, allows the user to create reports/dashboards relating to Titles and answer the following types of business questions:

• What is the best way to link physical holdings with portfolios in order to get a good collection representation?
• What is the usage for specific bibliographic records in the library?
• How can I run a report at the title level that does not have physical items?
• Can event data be associated with bibliographic and holdings records or only with items?
• How can I report on new acquisitions?

An example of an overlap report (Physical and Electronic) created on journal titles:

An example of an overlap report (Physical and Electronic) created on words in the subject field:

Can SCONUL reports be generated?

Alma’s Analytics supports data required for a number of industry standard benchmarking reports such as SCONUL, ARL and CAUL. The reports, designed by Ex Libris and by participating institutions, are available to all Alma customers via the shared reports feature.

The Industry Statistics dashboard which contains sample reports may be useful if your institution needs to send reports to library organizations such as ARL and SCONUL. The dashboard contains the following reports:

• Number of Objects
• Items Added, Items Withdrawal
• Item Count by library and Location
• Number of Loans and Renewals
• Inventory – Physical Inventory Count
• E-Inventory – Electronic Inventory Count
• Fulfillment – Annual Count of Loans and Renewals

Can customized reports be saved for reuse?

In addition to the institution folder (Alma University in the screen capture below), there is a Community area, that allows staff from all Alma institutions to post reporting options that can be shared by the entire Alma Community. An example of this can be seen in the following screen captures:

Community Reports:

Are failed reports logged with easily understood messages?

Alma Analytics supports logging of failed reports:

Report Distribution, Dissemination

Is viewing reports in Alma role-based?

Viewing reports in Alma is role based - for example only staff users with acquisitions roles and privileges will be able to view acquisition reports. Defining reports, widgets or dashboards requires also defining the roles that can view these outputs.

The following screenshot is for a report, that only a user with roles "Acquisitions Administrator" can view.

How are reports disseminated?

Alma provides for the automated dissemination of reports on a scheduled basis. Library staff can schedule a report to run periodically; authorized staff may then subscribe to the report and receive the output in an email sent automatically based on the report schedule (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly).

Dashboards can be accessed by authorized staff from Alma.

Staff users with roles linked to a report or dashboard, may choose the reports that he/she wishes to subscribe to. These will be emailed to subscribed staff at defined intervals.

The following is an example of a scheduled report sent to an email address:

Can reports be exported in different formats?

All reports are exportable in a variety of formats including: PDF, Excel, PowerPoint, mht, csv, tab delimited and xml.

See for example the two screenshots below which demonstrate this for both a graph and a table

Report Sharing

What options are available for report sharing and collaboration?

Alma Analytics enables sharing of out-of-the-box reports created by Ex Libris. In addition, there is a Community area, that allows staff from all Alma institutions to post reporting options that can be shared by the whole Alma Community. The "Community" folder is a read / write folder visible and accessible to save and copy for all institutions. It includes reports and dashboards made by and to be used by all institutions in the world. It contains only queries (no data of other institutions is visible).

An example of this can be seen in the following screen capture.

 

 

Alma Analytics Export General Comments

The purpose of Alma Analytics is for obtaining trends and statistics so that evidence based decision making can be made on library processes.

If the institution desires to export large amounts of data from Alma then there are multiple process to do so, and they should be used instead of Alma analytics.

For example:

• The general publishing profile allows the institution to export a set of bibliographic records which could theoretically contain the entire catalog and then continue to automatically run with incremental changes. This export can include all bibliographic fields as well as information of related inventory such as portfolios, electronic collections, physical items and digital objects. It can be run manually or scheduled to run on a regular basis and export to an ftp server.
• Users can be exported using the integration profile of type users. All users can be exported, or they can be exported according to various conditions.
• Fines and fees can be exported using the integration profile of type bursar. All fines and fees can be exported, or they can be exported according to various conditions.
• URLs of bibliographic records, electronic resources and digital titles can be done using the job "Export URLs"
• Physical items can be exported using the job 'Export physical items'
• Digital titles can be exported using the job "Export digital titles"
• Local authority records can be exported using the job "Export authority records"

There is a 10,000,000 line limit for exports of Alma Analytics reports in csv format. The limit is in place in order to ensure the efficient use of OBI with the multi-tenant cloud environment.

 

 

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