Resource Management - December 2016 Enhancements

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Moving an Item Record from One Bibliographic Record to Another Bibliographic Record

Previously, you were able to move items from one bibliographic record to another bibliographic record at the holdings level. With this release, you can move an individual item or multiple items from one bibliographic record to another bibliographic record.

Since item records may be linked to several different processes, where applicable, the following functional areas of Alma are evaluated and handled when you request to move an individual item. Unless otherwise noted, the outstanding/pending processes are moved with the item.

Requests
Loans
Reading lists
Holds
Resource sharing requests
Work orders
PO lines – For certain use cases, items attached to a PO line cannot be moved to another bibliographic record. When this occurs an informational error message appears. This happens in instances where the item that you want to move is under a bibliographic record with other items that point to the same PO line.
Fines and fees – Fines and fees are attached to a loan and are typically not affected if an item is moved. However, when a barcode is added to the fine or fee, it is then also attached to the item. When this occurs, the fine/fee title is changed to the title from the new record. In either case, the fee owner remains as it was.

As a result of this enhancement, the following changes have been implemented on the List of Items page:

The Move Items button has been relabeled Change Holdings
The Move row action (Actions > Move) has been relabeled Change Location
The Relink Items button has been relabeled Relink to another Bib

See the Working with the List of Items section for more information.

Enhanced Barcode Number Generation

The barcode generation feature was enhanced to provide a library-level barcode counter in addition to the existing institution-level barcode counter and the ability to create multiple barcode counter sequences. Your existing barcode counter sequence will be identified as the default at the institution level effective with this release. For more information, see Configuring the Barcode Generation Method and Barcode Validation.

Upload Electronic Holdings from Ovid

A new Upload Electronic Holdings integration profile is provided for Ovid collections. The Ovid integration profile can be used to automatically update the institution electronic holdings for Ovid electronic collections and, thereby, eliminate the more manual workflow that you currently use. See Upload Electronic Holdings from Ovid for more information.

Directional Control Characters

With the December release, Alma provides support for inserting directional control characters when cataloging in the MD Editor. These characters are used to control the direction of the text when cataloging text that has both left-to-right and right-to-left languages. Since directional control characters are non-printing characters, they are normally not visible. However, as part of this new feature, you can use the options in the MD Editor to show the directional control characters when you are cataloging. See the MD Editor Menu and Toolbar Options section for more information.

Hanzi to Pinyin Normalization

A normalization process has been added for Hanzi to Pinyin transliterations. This enables catalogers to more easily enhance bibliographic and authority records when working in the MD Editor. See Working with Normalization Processes for more information.

Generate Alternative and Temporary Item-Level Call Numbers

When editing items on the Physical Item Editor page, the new Generate button can be used to create alternative and/or temporary item-level call numbers from sequences defined in the Accession Number configuration. See Configuring Other Settings (Resource Management) and Configuring Accession Numbers to configure your system for this new capability and Updating Item-Level Information for how to use it.

Calculate Alternative and Temporary Item-Level Call Numbers

When editing items on the Physical Item Editor page, the new Calculate button can be used to create alternative and/or temporary item-level call numbers based on existing call numbers in the Alma repository. See Updating Item-Level Information for more information.

You may choose to configure your system to use both the Calculate and Generate features on the Physical Item Editor page or only one of either of these features.

If you are interested in using this feature, contact Ex Libris to configure this capability for your institution.

Semi-Annual Re-indexing

Several new enhancements are becoming available as a result of the re-indexing process starting at the beginning of December. See the following list:

The authorities 100 $t field is now also indexed under the Uniform Titles authorities index (in addition to already being indexed under Name Titles).
Subfield $p (the name of a part/section of a work) of field 830 (Series Added Entry – Uniform Title) was added to the Series field in the repository search results.
The note subfields $x and $z of the holdings field 863 are now searchable through the Holdings Note index.

Additional Resource Management Enhancements

As announced in the August 2016 release, the Export URLs configuration option under Resource Management (Resource Management > Resource Configuration > Configuration Menu > Record Export section) was removed. See Export URL Options Expanded. The Extracting Electronic Portfolio URLs - Export URLs (To Be Deprecated) and the Viewing Extracted Electronic Portfolio URLs Job Report (To Be Deprecated) sections have been removed from the online help.
As a performance improvement, when a record is edited and saved in the MD Editor, only that record is refreshed. Previously, all draft records (not released) listed in the left panel of the MD Editor were refreshed when one of the records in the list was edited and saved.
The drools/remove856.dslr normalization rule can now be used in the MD Editor.
When deleting electronic collections, the pop-up confirmation dialog box was updated to indicate the number of portfolios that are going to be deleted in a background job that is run to complete this process. For more information, see the Delete entry under Electronic Collections in the Actions You Can Perform on the Repository Search Results Page table.
The holdings copy number, if one exists for the holdings, is now appended to the holdings location information displayed on the List of Items page. The copy number was also added to the holdings information displayed when a single item is selected from the List of Items, or when clicking Add Item on the List of Items page.
If you include the Duplicate Validation MARC21 Holding Other Title task in your validation check (Resource Management > Resource Configuration > Configuration Menu > Cataloging > Metadata Configuration, select MARC21 Holding, click the Validation Processes tab, edit a validation process, select the Task List tab, select the Duplicate Validation MARC21 Holding Other Title task from the Process List Pool, and click Add to Selection), the Check different locations for duplicate call numbers check box appears in the Task Parameters tab. If this check box is selected, the validation check is performed on holdings records in different locations. If this check box is cleared, the validation check is performed only on the holdings records in the current location.
The Publishing to Primo job now publishes up to 1000 relations per bibliographic record.
The deployment of the browse bibliographic headings sorting improvement started in November continues with the December release. See the Browse Bibliographic Headings Sorting Improvement section from the November release notes for more information.
The following physical item material types were added to Alma:
- DAT (Digital Audio Tape)
- Globe
- Laptop Accessory
- Microopaque
- Motion picture
- Record (phonodisc)
- Video Recording (Other)