Alma April 2017 Release Notes

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The April 2017 release is primarily devoted to maintenance, cloud infrastructure and other important tasks that periodically need to be handled in order to ensure that Alma meets the highest standards of performance and high availability. The release notes include several updates for April, a description of some of our current focus areas, and a few sneak previews of good things to come.

Benchmark Analytics

The new Benchmark subject area was added to Alma Analytics. With this subject area, you can create Analytics reports comparing the performance of your institution to similar institutions. For more information, see Benchmark.

Community Zone Updates

In the past six months, the Community Zone KnowledgeBase was updated as follows:
- 856 electronic collections were added.
- 19 electronic collections were withdrawn.
- Portfolios from 3161 electronic collections were added, updated, or deleted.
As part of Ex Libris' efforts to incorporate 360KB content into the Alma Community Zone:
- 9,092 collections representing databases (zero title databases) were added.
- 46 full text collections were added.
Community Zone bibliographic records were enriched from different providers as follows:
- ProQuest: 1.2 million records
- IEEE: 320 records
- Cambridge University Press: 31250 records
- Credo Reference: 700 records
- Springer: 195000 records
- Oxford University Press: 25000 records
Click here for authority record Community Zone updates and new electronic collections added to the Alma CKB in the past month.
Alma's community continues to contribute to the Community Zone. The following graph displays a breakdown of Alma community contributions:

New Projects and Enhancements

The UX redesign project in underway and the Alma team is working hard on the infrastructure changes in Alma in order to ensure a smooth rollout of the early access release in June. As part of this important project, Ex Libris recently hosted a UX design workshop to test the new UI against real day-to-day tasks and workflows. Read the blog about the workshop here. See the UX rollout plan here.
As a result of input from the Authentication Focus Group, we are working on new authentication options. A new feature—Sign In with Email—will be released for early access customers as part of the June release.
Ex Libris continues to extend the real-time ordering and auto holdings update integration with additional vendor systems. Stay tuned for more updates.
Effective with the April release, Alma customers with bX installed will automatically be activated in a gradual manner to contribute Alma link resolver statistics to the bX database.

Regional Updates

New Data Centers were recently opened in Canada and China.
We are improving and enhancing Alma’s support of CNMARC for the Chinese market.
For German-speaking countries, we are providing enhanced Community Zone-level support for RVK and GND.
For Italian institutions, we are in the certification process for integration with SBN.

APIs

The order of the fields returned by Ex Libris' REST APIs is not guaranteed and should not be assumed to remain constant. Best practice when using the REST APIs is to access fields by name rather than the field's position within the returned object. For example, the Primary ID field of the User object should be accessed as user.primary_id.
With this release, the order of the fields within the JSON objects returned by some REST APIs differs from previous results. Applications that access fields by name will not be affected by this change.

Note that this change does not affect the order of fields in XML objects returned by APIs. For more information, see https://developers.exlibrisgroup.com/blog/How-we-re-building-APIs-at-Ex-Libris#FieldOrder.

Sneak Preview of Future Releases

Merge and Combine – Alma currently supplies the option to identify duplicate bibliographic records in the repository using the Duplicate Title Analysis batch job. This job creates a report of the duplicates found according to a certain identifier. To remove the redundant records from the repository, a new batch job is being developed, Merge Records and Combine Inventory. This job uses the report created by the Duplicate Title Analysis job to merge the duplicate records and combine the inventory of those records under one bibliographic record. This functionality is currently being tested by the Orbis Cascade Alliance and will be available to all Alma users in a future release.
Automated Fulfillment Network – With this feature, institutions working with a fulfillment network will be able to let their patrons request items held at any one of the fulfillment network member institutions, without having to manually select the supplier and without having to manage the request status. This new feature is currently being tested and will be available to all Alma users within a few months.
View a list of the features that are planned for the May Alma release.