Alma March 2017 Release Notes

This Alma release provides numerous new features and enhancements. Some of these enhancements are a result of Idea Exchange or NERS initiatives.

Download a PDF of the Release Notes - Note that the PDF includes the online help pages that describe the core functionality of the new features.

Make the Most of This Release

Action Items
Authority Headings Display Options – If you find that the information displayed for the F3 lookup of an authority heading is not sufficient to clearly determine the correct heading, you can now customize and enhance the heading display.
Changing Location for a Reading Room Loan – Reading room loans often require management processes that are different than those of regular loans, such as processes for managing courtesy letters and overdue loans. If you having been looking for easy ways to implement reading room processes, check out the new option to automatically change the location of items that are loaned at the reading room.
Automatic Print Slip Option on the Receiving Items Page – Resource sharing borrowers now have an easy way to print temporary barcodes and other borrowed item information at receive time. Configure your receive slip (or activate the out-of-the-box one), and start printing receive slips with no additional effort.
New Licenses Subject Area – As part of the March release the new Alma Analytics Licenses subject area includes a wide array of information pertaining to the license. The information contained here comes from the license header as well as the license terms. Retrieval can be performed not only on the names of the terms but also on the values, allowing for the institution to maintain a close appraisal of the status and contents of the various licenses.

The following sections present the new and changed features in this release of Alma.

Acquisitions Enhancements – Several enhancements were made to the Acquisitions functional area for the March release.

Authority Headings Display Options – Authority headings display results for preferred/nonpreferred records (using F3) can be expanded with new configurable options to provide greater detail.
Watch the Authority Headings Display Options video.
Additional Resource Management Enhancements

Support for Access Rights for Remote Digital Repositories – You can now configure Alma to check access rights policies in a remote repository. This was implemented with Rosetta and can be used for other digital asset management systems that support this type of real-time check.
Additional Digital Resource Management Enhancements

NERS Enhancement (Request ID 4661): Renewal Enhancements in Manage Patron Services – Two new columns were added in the Loans list in Manage Patron Services in order to better manage the Renew Selected and Renew All actions.
Keep Old Values When Overwriting or Rolling Over Courses – When editing or rolling over a course and a field is marked for overwrite, you can instruct the job to keep the old values in the course loader integration profile.
Integration with the Digital Content Store (UK) – You can now attach items to the CLA's Digital Content Store (UK only).
Changing Location for a Reading Room Loan – A library now has the option to temporarily change the location of an item that is loaned at a reading room.
Additional Fulfillment Enhancements

Idea Exchange: Automatic Print Slip Option on the Receiving Items Page – Print slips may now be set to automatically print from the Receiving Items page.
Additional Resource Sharing Enhancements

Templates for Externally Managed Authority Records – Templates can now be created in the Network Zone for externally managed authority records.

Idea Exchange: New Licenses Subject Area – The new Licenses subject area was added, allowing you to create Analytics reports concerning license information.
Additional Analytics Enhancements

Running Student Information System (User) jobs using the Jobs API is now supported.
available_balance was added as a field to the GET Funds API.
An API was created to change a logical set to an itemized one.
The reading list's visibility and publishing status were added to the reading list API. These fields are relevant for Leganto customers.
Idea Exchange: Full text links can now be retrieved using an API. The links are included in the resolution_url field in the CTO API: https://developers.exlibrisgroup.com/alma/integrations/discovery/services_page