[Wactclc-alma] Question on Alma/CTC Link User Purge Dates

Thu Mar 2 15:10:28 PST 2023

A couple notes on the great conversation about this topic:

You could have a list of purged students if you ran an Analytics report and save the file externally prior to running a patron purge.  You would need to have a regular manual file deletion depending on how long you want to retain former user records.

Our college also has a lot of college students coming in and out of the enrollment throughout the year so I have the following set at Peninsula College for expiration date and purge date for students:

     *   Expiration date +30 days after end of quarter. We check out books to students for 30 days. My thinking is that I don't want a continuing student who is checking out material near the end of each quarter to have a reduced checkout period, so the 30-day extension is to keep the rollover invisible for students.  It also works nicely to cover the December break.
     *   Purge date +90 days after EOQ.  This way students who skip a quarter will not have their records deleted with potential consequences such as the Primo lists issue.  It also helps extend things over the Summer for our Spring students in case they wait to enroll for fall until September.

We have our faculty and staff accounts set to expire 30 days after the end of term UNLESS they are active at least one quarter per academic year.   If that is the case, then they rollover each quarter until they are terminated or are no longer active for the academic year.  Similar to Seattle College, for terminated employees/staff, the Alma accounts are no longer updated daily in Alma so I am able to change manually adjust the expiration date and eventually the records will be purged in case they come back fairly quickly which happens with some of our part-time positions.

I like having the purge date 90 days afterwards as I can run purges anytime if necessary and still be sure that there is a decent delay for users before their accounts are permanently deleted.  Alternatively, you can also set a delay in the purge job when you run it in Alma to however many days you want using the "Number of days after purge date" field.  I chose to go with just having the purge date be extended because I can imagine myself forgetting to put a number (say 90) in that field and purging more records than I intended to.

[cid:1a82b955-74ea-4132-a336-9b31b4a05e42]

Cheers,

Will Parnell
Library Paraprofessional 4
Peninsula College
Library Media Center
wparnell at pencol.edu
360-417-6274
________________________________
From: Wactclc-alma <wactclc-alma-bounces at lists.ctc.edu> on behalf of Miller, Amanda <AmandaM at bigbend.edu>
Sent: Thursday, March 2, 2023 2:07 PM
To: WACTCLC Alma Discussion <wactclc-alma at lists.ctc.edu>
Subject: Re: [Wactclc-alma] Question on Alma/CTC Link User Purge Dates

The reason would be just to make this project a bit easier. We have a hard drive with digital copies of Departmental Borrowing Agreements (DBAs) that I need to go through. These files are named with just their SID/CTCLink numbers. Having a list of purged accounts would make it easier to find the DBAs that need to be deleted. But since Alma won’t do that I guess I work this the hard way and that is okay.

Thank you!!

Amanda

From: Wactclc-alma <wactclc-alma-bounces at lists.ctc.edu> On Behalf Of Thomas, Kirsti
Sent: Thursday, March 2, 2023 1:56 PM
To: WACTCLC Alma Discussion <wactclc-alma at lists.ctc.edu>
Subject: Re: [Wactclc-alma] Question on Alma/CTC Link User Purge Dates

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The job report will give you the list of user IDs for accounts that were *NOT* purged.

It can't give you a list of the accounts purged because those accounts no longer exist at the point when the job finishes running.

Because of the delay between Alma and Alma Analytics, you've got anywhere from 1 day to a few hours when the patron info is still in Alma Analytics but not in Alma, depending on what time of day you run the purge job.

What would be the reason for wanting a list of the accounts that were purged?

Kirsti

From: Wactclc-alma <wactclc-alma-bounces at lists.ctc.edu<mailto:wactclc-alma-bounces at lists.ctc.edu>> On Behalf Of Miller, Amanda
Sent: Thursday, March 2, 2023 13:44
To: WACTCLC Alma Discussion <wactclc-alma at lists.ctc.edu<mailto:wactclc-alma at lists.ctc.edu>>
Subject: Re: [Wactclc-alma] Question on Alma/CTC Link User Purge Dates

Kirsti,

Quick question… when you run a purge in Alma does it give you a list of the accounts that were purged? It would be really helpful if that were the case.

Amanda

From: Wactclc-alma <wactclc-alma-bounces at lists.ctc.edu<mailto:wactclc-alma-bounces at lists.ctc.edu>> On Behalf Of Thomas, Kirsti
Sent: Thursday, March 2, 2023 11:57 AM
To: WACTCLC Alma Discussion <wactclc-alma at lists.ctc.edu<mailto:wactclc-alma at lists.ctc.edu>>
Subject: Re: [Wactclc-alma] Question on Alma/CTC Link User Purge Dates

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Expiration dates control when people are no longer allowed to borrow library items.

Purge dates control when you decide you want to get rid of the patron record from the system. (It's worth noting that purging records isn't automatic. Records with purge dates in the past can stay in the system for years if you never run the purge job.)

Do what works for your library. :)

We have our student expiration dates set for start of the *following* quarter + 11 days.

We do this because we have significant numbers of students borrowing textbooks on Reserves & IT equipment who don't register until sometime in the first 10 days of the quarter. In some cases, the students are in programs where program staff handle the registration and the staff don't get around to updating ctcLink until the start of the quarter.  For us, the students most likely to use the library are also most likely to get registered late, so we've built in a buffer with the expiration date to make sure they can use the library and get IT equipment while the bureaucratic systems catch up.

For employees, we set the expiration date a year out from the start of the current quarter.

We have a lot of adjunct faculty who teach regularly but not every quarter, we want them to be able to borrow materials to prep for classes they plan to teach in upcoming quarters even if they're not currently on contract.

The IT person who handles our patron load has figured out how to identify employees who leave permanently. In these cases, we automatically update the patron expiration date to [today] (i.e. the last time their patron record was included in the daily loads)

We've been setting the purge date to be the same as the patron dates.

It doesn't really matter that the purge date is the same as the expiration date because I'm the only person running the purge job and I'm not ever going to manage to run the purge job on Day 12 of the quarter. ;)

I've been trying to run the patron purge every quarter, roughly 1 month after the start of the quarter. My reasoning is that I didn't want records with Personal Identifying Information (PII) sitting in the library system for any longer than absolutely necessary.

If a patron record has overdue, lost, or on-loan items on it, it won't get deleted by the purge. If it doesn't have any loans attached and the person isn't currently eligible to check things out, then we don't need to have their record in the system.  If someone does come back as a student or employee in a later quarter, they'll just get a new record and be part of the daily load again.

And because we're 3 colleges with 3 separate student records systems, we've have had problems in the past where duplicate student & employee records got created & later merged in the campus systems, but the duplicate records stayed in the library system & caused problems when people borrowed library materials.  I will note that this has basically stopped happening with ctcLink. I assume there's better duplicate checking now because of the ctcLink EMPLID being shared across all the WA community & technical colleges.

Carleigh said something in the meeting today though that has me rethinking the idea of quarterly patron record purges.  Carleigh mentioned a situation where someone had lost all their saved lists in Primo because their patron record was purged.

Our student enrollment is really unstable and we have a lot of students who attend for 1 quarter, don't take classes the following quarter (or 2 or 3 quarters), and then take classes again.

If purging patron records on a quarterly basis might be causing people to lose their saved Primo lists, then I think we want to avoid that.

Now I'm thinking I might look into whether there's a way to find out how many patrons have saved lists, etc. in Primo. If I see student patrons who do have lists, I'm tempted to keep records in the system for longer and maybe set the purge date for 1 year out for everybody and only run the purge job once a year.

It will be ok!

Kirsti S. Thomas

Library Technical Services Manager & Systems Librarian

Seattle Colleges

kirsti.thomas at seattlecolleges.edu<mailto:kirsti.thomas at seattlecolleges.edu>

From: Wactclc-alma <wactclc-alma-bounces at lists.ctc.edu<mailto:wactclc-alma-bounces at lists.ctc.edu>> On Behalf Of Martin, Melinda
Sent: Thursday, March 2, 2023 08:46
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Subject: Re: [Wactclc-alma] Question on Alma/CTC Link User Purge Dates

This is really helpful! I was hoping to clean this up on our campus as well – perhaps modify the CTCLink output. ??

-Melinda

From: Wactclc-alma <wactclc-alma-bounces at lists.ctc.edu<mailto:wactclc-alma-bounces at lists.ctc.edu>> On Behalf Of Herman, Amy
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Subject: Re: [Wactclc-alma] Question on Alma/CTC Link User Purge Dates

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Hi Amanda!  I was just talking with our I.T. liaison yesterday about our patron data load script.  We have ours set up as follows….

For students:

Expiry date = (Last day of current Quarter) + 7 days

Purge date = Expiry date + 30 days

For employees:

Expiry date = (Last day of current academic year) + 7 days

Purge date = Expiry date + 30 days

I am also am attaching a document I came across yesterday in my email archive, that Wade created way back when… see the section on “Export Selection Rules” on page 4 that gives some default values that he was suggesting at the time, which are different than we ultimately decided on for our library.

Amy Herman, Library Faculty

Olympic College

Bremerton, WA

aherman at olympic.edu<mailto:aherman at olympic.edu>

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From: Wactclc-alma <wactclc-alma-bounces at lists.ctc.edu<mailto:wactclc-alma-bounces at lists.ctc.edu>> On Behalf Of Miller, Amanda
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Subject: [EXTERNAL] - [Wactclc-alma] Question on Alma/CTC Link User Purge Dates

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Hi all,

I’m trying to understand how purge dates work in Alma & CTC Link as I have a project the requires checking this information. I found an analytics report in Oracle that lists all the expired users. Wade apparently made this and its given me a starting point for double checking expiry/purge dates. But I can find no discernable pattern. The dates appear to be randomly applied in Alma anywhere between 1 to 6 years between status dates and expiry/purge dates. Feeling a perplexed and more than a little confused I have a few questions…

What is considered a “normal” time period between a status/creation date to expiry/purge dates?

Is there way to normalize a purge date time frame so that it is consistently applied to all accounts in Alma?

Is this a CTC coding thing? I ask because I’ve seen expiry/purge dates change in Alma and we think there is some weirdness happening with CTC that may be the cause but cannot be sure. If that is the case, how do we verify that and how can it be resolved?

Thank you for any info you can provide!

Amanda Miller

Email: amandam at bigbend.edu<mailto:amandam at bigbend.edu>

Phone: 509-793-2356

Library & Archives Paraprofessional

William C. Bonadi Library

Big Bend Community College

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