May 2026

New Alma Specto Menu

A new Specto menu centralizes actions related exclusively to digital cataloging and digital content management.

Highlights

  • Digital-only actions are available in a single dedicated menu

  • Shared actions are duplicated to preserve existing workflows

  • Matching Specto section added under Configuration

  • Improved access to digital workflows

Note: All digital-only actions have been relocated to the new Specto menu. Any actions that are used for other use-cases have been duplicated into the Specto menu.

Gallery View in Digital Title Search

A new Gallery View displays digital titles in a visual-first layout.

Highlights

  • New Gallery View alongside Record and Table views

  • Visual emphasis on digital content

  • Thumbnail zoom control

  • Sticky view preference across sessions

New Viewer in Right-Hand Side Slide-In

Digital content can now be previewed directly in Alma via a right-hand slide-in viewer from Digital Title Search.

Highlights

  • Built-in viewer accessible from search results

  • Enables viewing digital content directly within Alma without need to click out to the resource

  • Supports image format (e.g., JPG, PNG, TIFF), and PDF formats, with plans to expand to support all content types (video, audio, and more)

  • Uses the same viewer as Primo NDE

Next-Generation Digital File Search

What's new

The Digital File Search page has been upgraded to Alma’s Next-Generation interface.

Highlights

  • Modern NG layout and styling

  • Improved responsiveness and facets

  • No functional change to search behavior

  • Consistent experience with other Alma NG pages

Add MARC21 Fields Job

A new job enables bulk addition of MARC21 fields to Bibliographic records.

Highlights

  • Run the job from searches or saved sets

  • Supports standard MARC field and subfield syntax

  • Record-level validation applied after execution to align with institutional validation rules

  • Available for all Bibliographic titles

Tesseract OCR Extraction and ALTO Generation Upgrade

The full text extraction tool has been upgraded to generate ALTO files when possible.

Highlights

  • Improved OCR accuracy for typed scans

  • Automatic ALTO generation with fallback to plain text

  • Enables in-document search highlighting

  • Enhances full-text discovery

Note: PDF extracted full-text will always generate a Plain text file, with hit-highlight functionality built into the PDF viewer.

Side-by-Side Metadata Editor with Viewer

The Metadata Editor now supports viewing digital content alongside metadata editing.

Highlights

  • View digital content directly in the Metadata Editor: Select View Related Data > View Digital Content or Keyboard shortcut Alt + Shift + D

  • Supports selecting different representations via the Digital Inventory list

  • Improves cataloging accuracy and efficiency