[Wactclc-alma] question about deleting vs withdrawing

Thu Jan 4 19:29:53 PST 2018

To answer your question about the Statistical Note:

The three Statistical Notes fields can either be free-text fields, or they can function as drop-down fields with values pulled from a table. Alma being Alma, the Statistical Notes fields can also function as both at the same time(!).

If you want to have a drop-down option for any of the Statistical Notes fields in the Item Record View, there are 2 things you have to do:

1)      Go into Configuration > Resources > Other Settings and change the statistics_note_controlled field from false to true

2)      Go into Configuration > Resources > General > Statistics note [1, 2, or 3] and create a table.  Whatever you put in the Description field will show up in the drop-down menu for that note in the item record.  Whatever you put in the Code field will show up in Alma Analytics.  Once you create this table, it's important to know that *whatever* you have set as the default value will automatically show up on every single item record you have.  That's why our Statistics 1 table has a default value with the Code: blank and the Description: none.  When we first created the table, we had set the default value to be withdrawn/weeded and that caused all kinds of panic until we realized what was going on and changed the default value.

Once you've created your table, you can manually select a value for Statistics Note X from a drop-down menu in the Item Record View.

If you update Statistics Note X via Change Physical Items under Admin > Manage Jobs and Sets > Run a Job, then the field functions as a free-text field-there's no drop-down of available values to select.  We learned that when you set up the Statistics Note to use pre-set values from a table, Alma Analytics will only display the "Code" from the table, not the "Description."  If you update the Statistics Note in batch via a Job, you have to remember to use the "Code" instead of the "Description." Otherwise the items you updated individually have a different values in the Alma Analytics Statistics Note field than the items updated via batch job.  I don't know if that made any sense.

Going off on a tangent related to my earlier post, I ran across some documentation that Ex Libris has on how to restore deleted records, either individually or in batch.  I'm including links in case they're helpful:

https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Alma/Product_Documentation/Alma_Online_Help_(English)/Resource_Management/070Advanced_Tools/Restoring_Deleted_Records
https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Alma/Product_Documentation/Alma_Online_Help_(English)/Administration/070Managing_Jobs/020Running_Manual_Jobs_on_Defined_Sets#Restoring_Records_Removed_or_Changed_by_Jobs

To answer the question about the boxes and arrows on my screenshots:

I do that in Microsoft OneNote-which is IMO a criminally undermarketed part of the MS Office package.  OneNote has a built-in screen clipping tool that gets activated after you open OneNote for the first time.  In Windows 7, I use the windows key+shift+s shortcut to select and clip part of my screen.  The clipping is then automatically dumped into OneNote where I can resize it and add markings to it with the Draw feature. (Note: The clipping and pasting may work differently in Windows 10.)

Once I've added the markings, I select and clip the image a second time to "freeze" the markings in place-otherwise the screen-clipping is one image and the box/arrow is a second image and the box/arrow won't stay in place when I move the screen-clipping around whatever document I put it in.

I hope all of this made sense!

Kirsti

From: Wactclc-alma [mailto:wactclc-alma-bounces at lists.ctc.edu] On Behalf Of Tammy Siebenberg
Sent: Thursday, January 04, 2018 18:24
To: WACTCLC Alma Discussion <wactclc-alma at lists.ctc.edu>
Subject: Re: [Wactclc-alma] question about deleting vs withdrawing

Kirsti,

In your step-by-step guide, how did you create the Statistical Notes lookup options?

Also, how do you add such nice arrows and boxes to indicate things?

Tammy

Tammy R. Siebenberg, MLIS
Director - Library & Media Services
Yakima Valley College
Yakima, WA  98902
509.574.4984
tsiebenberg at yvcc.edu<mailto:tsiebenberg at yvcc.edu>
www.yvcc.edu<https://www.yvcc.edu/>

From: Wactclc-alma [mailto:wactclc-alma-bounces at lists.ctc.edu] On Behalf Of Thomas, Kirsti
Sent: Thursday, January 4, 2018 2:22 PM
To: WACTCLC Alma Discussion <wactclc-alma at lists.ctc.edu<mailto:wactclc-alma at lists.ctc.edu>>
Subject: Re: [Wactclc-alma] question about deleting vs withdrawing

Amy,

>From what I've pieced together, deleting and withdrawing are the same thing in Alma.  When you get rid of a bib/holding/item record, Alma doesn't seem to remove it from the system entirely.  Instead, it's more like Alma flags the record in such a way that it's not visible in the Alma user interface anymore.  The data for the record is still on the servers (I think?) and all the data that was reportable in Analytics before the record was deleted/withdrawn is still there after the record gets deleted/withdrawn.  I have a colleague at another institution whose student worker accidentally deleted a bunch of bibs/items and I think Ex Libris was able to restore everything because the data isn't really deleted, just hidden.

When you withdraw items, either one at a time or in batch, you get prompted on whether or not you want to delete attached bibs and holdings if the item you're withdrawing is the last copy.

Records that have been deleted/withdrawn in Alma are flagged in Analytics an "Inactive."  Records that haven't been deleted/withdrawn in Alma are flagged in Analytics as "Active."  I recently had a call with Ex Libris where they reminded me to start including the Active/Inactive flag in my Analytics reports.  We only started withdrawing items in Alma a month or two ago, so for a while everything in our system was "Active" and I didn't have to worry about it.

Alma doesn't make a distinction between deleting something because you made a mistake and added it in error, and withdrawing something that was part of the library collection.  We modified a procedure from University of Portland to add a statistics note to things that we're withdrawing so that we can make that distinction in our own statistics.  The note we add specifies whether the withdrawn item was damaged, lost, weeded, returned to the owning instructor, etc.  This way we can keep better track of why we're withdrawing things.  I've got our step-by-step instructions in a Word document in Google Drive if anyone is interested:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=12Yro4DQUYS8xW74Ms9BRmwZCenaYgAF7

It will be ok!

Kirsti S. Thomas
Library Technical Services Manager
Seattle Colleges
kirsti.thomas at seattlecolleges.edu<mailto:kirsti.thomas at seattlecolleges.edu>

From: Wactclc-alma [mailto:wactclc-alma-bounces at lists.ctc.edu] On Behalf Of Herman, Amy
Sent: Thursday, January 04, 2018 11:03
To: WACTCLC Alma Discussion <wactclc-alma at lists.ctc.edu<mailto:wactclc-alma at lists.ctc.edu>>
Subject: [Wactclc-alma] question about deleting vs withdrawing

We are removing a book off course reserve that is the personal copy of an instructor, and sending it back to her.  Should we delete the record, or just withdraw?  We will never need this book again so it would seem we could delete the record, but will we lose usage data?  I thought I remembered something about still being able to access deleted item data in analytics... if so, which data are stored for deleted records?

Thanks!

Amy Herman
Library Faculty | Olympic College
1600 Chester Avenue | Bremerton, WA 98337
aherman at olympic.edu<mailto:aherman at olympic.edu> | 360-475-7256

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