March Sneak Preview
The features below are currently planned for the next release. However, some of these features may, for various reasons, not be included in this month's release, but rather in a future Alma release.
Resource Management
- New & Improved Overlap Analysis Tool - To achieve better collection development analysis capabilities of libraries' electronic holdings, the Overlap Analysis Tool has been improved to support additional use cases.
In addition, we are introducing a new interface for the Overlap Analysis Tool for easy and intuitive report creation and summary results.
We would like to thank the Overlap Analysis Customer Focus Group for their valuable input throughout the development cycle of the tool: requirements, design, user studies and early access feedback. - Accession Number - Library Level Definition - To better support Library independence within an institution it will now be possible for a library to define library level accession sequences for controlling the automatic generation of holdings and item accession numbers.
- NERS Enhancement – Create Indication Rules Using a Form – Users will now be able to create indication rules from the MD Editor (doesn’t require cataloging privileges). The form can be created in a simple and easy manner without having a knowledge of the metadata format (e.g., a search by TITLE will bring up a list of all the metadata title fields), or the drool language.
- ** Idea Exchange** Choosing My Library for Holdings and Physical Items Search – The Inventory operator will be able to define one or more library as their scope of work when searching for Holdings or Physical Items. This will reduce the number of repeated clicks needed to perform similar searches in the same libraries. The chosen libraries will be persistent across the searches and sessions.
Fulfillment & Resource Sharing
- Expanding the Loan Due Date Beyond Patron Expiry - It will be possible for authorized operators to override the automatic shortening of a loan due date that is triggered by a near term user record expiry.
- Prevent Unintended Message Confirmations - It will be possible to remove the automatic focusing of loan time messages to the OK button. In this way, operator’s scan on the next item will not mistakenly close an error or warning message triggered by the previous loan action. Instead, an explicit confirmation will be required.
- WorldShare and Tipasa Integration - It will be possible to set Alma to automatically push borrower requests into WorldShare or Tipasa, where further processing of the borrower request will continue as a broker managed request.