Users

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How are users with multiple affiliations supported with respect to authentication, permissions, etc.?

Institutions’ user lists are loaded separately. A user who is a graduate student at institution A and staff at B will be loaded in two separate feeds into two separate Alma user management systems – as graduate patron at institution A and staff at institution B.

There is no link in the system between these two records. In other words, the same patron when requesting fulfillment services from institution A will be identified as a graduate student and when requesting fulfillment services from institution B will be identified as a staff.

Future plans for Alma enable the two feeds to include a consortially unique ID that will enable Alma to link the institution A and institution B records. Still, fulfillment services at each institution will be applied as per the patron attributes that have been loaded into that same institution.

Access to system screens and data is controlled by Alma roles, which are assigned to users in Alma. Each role allows its owner access to specific actions and data in the system. The roles may also be controlled by scope, in a manner that allows its owner access to data and workflows only in the context of the specific libraries. For example, an operator may be granted a role of ‘Purchasing Operator’ in the scope of Library A, which will result in being able to process acquisitions purchase orders only for Library A. The users’ roles and scopes are managed by an Alma user who is given a “User Manager” role.

Can member institutions of the network share their users?

A consortium that shares other aspects of their resource management, such as managing a shared catalog, may also manage a single shared user file. In this scenario, the user file is managed once and is accessible to all consortia members that need to make use of it.

Sharing a single user file is not mandatory for implementing shared fulfillment between institutions. Consortia members may manage their user files independently of one another, sharing a specific patron’s information on a ‘just in time’ manner – when the patron requests or borrows an item from another institution. When sharing patron information is done in this manner, institutions may hide some user types from having their information being shared with other institutions.

Another applicable model is based on an ILL model, allowing resources of different institutions to be shared without sharing any patron information.

Does Alma support centrally managed role profiles?

Role profiles and role assignment rules may be created by the Network Zone and distributed automatically to the member institutions. The job, 'Distribute network user management changes to members', will copy the profiles and assignment rules from the Network Zone to its members. The member institutions will have view permission to the records but will not be able to edit or delete them.

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