Alma December 2024 Release Notes
Upcoming Issues to Note
Elevating Your Experience with Our Service Excellence Program
We are committed to enhancing your experience through our Service Excellence Program, driven by your valuable feedback and support needs.
Key initiatives for the upcoming year include:
- Improved visibility into cases requiring development support.
- Estimated timelines for issue resolutions.
- Consistent updates: Regular status updates on cases at set intervals.
To achieve these goals, we are launching the Defect Backlog Resolution Project for Alma and PrimoVE in collaboration with the ELUNA and IGELU Steering Committees.Resolved issues will be documented in the release notes starting from the December 2024 release.
We will keep you informed of our progress and appreciate your ongoing feedback. We look forward to continually enhancing your experience.
2025 Release Schedule is Now Available
Click here to view the 2025 release schedule.
Click here to download an ics file to add the 2025 release dates into your calendar.
Features
Introducing the New Title Search Experience
Metadata Management URM 174471
Enabling this was postponed from November, and it will be enabled on the Sunday of the December release.
Alma's repository search is upgraded with new UI concepts, resulting in faster, simpler searches and streamlined workflows, saving time and boosting productivity - starting with the title searches. The new search offers more actions that can be performed directly from the search and enhanced navigation options, bringing your workflows into the search page and enabling you to perform them while in the original search context. Introducing a new approach to loading the search results, the new search offers improved search performance and a gradual loading, showing information as soon as it is available and adding more details as they become ready and enabling users to start working faster.
Watch the New All Titles Search Webinar video (1:01:22 mins).
Watch the All Titles Staff Search video (6:56 mins).
All Titles Search - Results Page
To turn on the new title searches, click on your user icon (
) in Alma's persistent bar, select Feature Rollout Preferences, and activate the New Title Search toggle. For information on the coming search experience, see Introduction to the New Title Search Experience.
New Titles Search activation
Set Usage Section in the Manage Sets Page
User Experience, Accessibility & Infrastructure URM 216897
Updated - November 26, 2024- The 'Set Usage' section in the Manage Sets page has been removed from all environments (Production and Sandbox), due to internal performance considerations. Further updates on its potential reinstatement will be provided in future releases.
Resolved Known Issues for the New Manage Patron Service UI
Fulfillment and Resource Sharing
A number of known issues in the new Manage Patron Service UI were resolved. For more information see Managing Patron Services.
Improvements to Physical Item Loan Fields
Analytics and Insights URM-227924
To clarify when fields in the Physical Items subject area include migrated data and when they do not, the following changes were implemented:
- The following fields in the Physical Item Details dimension were renamed to clarify that the field values include pre-migration data:
Original Name New Name Num of Loans (In House + Not In House) Num of Loans Including Pre-Migration (In House + Not In House) Num of Loans (In House) Num of Loans Including Pre-Migration (In House) Num of Loans (Not In House) Num of Loans Including Pre-Migration (Not In House) Times Loaned Times Loaned Including Pre-Migration - The recently added Loan Measures dimension was renamed to Loan Measures Post-Migration to indicate that it contains only post-migration loan data. This dimension includes fields that display the total number of loans post-migration, in addition to the number of loans per item made in the past one, two, three, four, five, or more than five years, categorized by in-house, not in-house, or total loans.
You may need to update your reports to better reflect the loan activity in your library.
Additional Enhancements
- Fulfillment and Resource Sharing URM-233734
In the Feature Rollout Preferences screen,New Circulation Desk UI was changed to New Manage Patron Services. - User Experience, Accessibility & InfrastructureURM-233701
In the User Menu, the existing Enable Tips option was changed to Show what's new. This is only relevant for customers that enabled Digital Adoption (Configuration > General > General Configuration > Digital Adoption). See User Menu for details. - Analytics and InsightsURM-232555 URM-216762
The following fields relating to Dublin Core bibliographic records were added to the Bibliographic Details dimension for all subject areas in which it appears:- DC Provenance – displays elements used to provide a statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource.
- DC Source – displays the element used to provide information about a related resource from which the described resource is derived.
- DC Relation – displays the element used to provide information about a related resource to the described resource.
- DC Coverage – displays the element used to provide information about the spatial or temporal topic of the resource, spatial applicability of the resource, or jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant.
- DC Type – displays the element used to provide information about the nature or genre of the resource.
- Analytics and InsightsURM-233434
The new COUNTER Report SUSHI Harvesting Analysis With Prompt By Load File Upload Year out-of-the-box analytics report is now available under Shared Folders > Alma > Usage via COUNTER reports - Release 5 > Reports. It is also located on the Usage via COUNTER Reports dashboard as the COUNTER Report SUSHI Harvesting tab. This report displays SUSHI Harvesting according to load file upload year.
Resolved Issues
| SF number | Area | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 07498881 07018122 | Acquisitions | An incorrect check was done for PO lines that had material type but were without inventory, when updating by API. This was fixed. |
| 07022995 07270554 07274449 07193683 07024776 | Acquisitions | In a specific case, the hold item request was not created for an interested user when an item went through the work order process. This was fixed. |
| 07163768 | Acquisitions | An error occurred when saving changes for a Webhook integration profile. This was fixed. |
| 07691828 | Acquisitions | There was a significant slowdown in the Purchase Orders in the Review Task list. This was fixed. |
| 07207442 | Acquisitions | The default review rule was handled incorrectly, which impacted default rules with a value of False. This was fixed. |
| 07485441 | Acquisitions | The POL "Order Collections" section was missing a label for the column showing the icon related to the source of inventory. This was fixed. |
| 07102401 | Analytics and Insights | The values of the Available for Group, Available for Group Members, and Available for Resource Type fields under E-Inventory > Portfolio and E-Inventory > Portfolio Details for Consortia Members > Portfolio were not accurate. This was fixed. |
| 07151821 | Analytics and Insights | Several LC classification codes were not displayed in Analytics. This was fixed. |
| 06895528 | Analytics and Insights | When including the Work Order Status field in reports in the Physical Item Historical Events subject area, no data appeared in the report. This was fixed. |
| 07272591 | Analytics and Insights | The Source of Description Note field that exists in the Bibliographic Details dimension in all subject areas was missing from Titles > Bibliographic Details. It was added. |
| 07218440 | Analytics and Insights | The link to an analytics object in the letter received by subscribers does not display the report if the report name contained diacritics. This was fixed. |
| 07234139 | Analytics and Insights | The 103 and 110 event types erroneously appeared in analytics reports. These event types were removed from analytics. |
| 07205053 | Analytics and Insights | In the Analytics Object List, if you sorted the list and exported it to Excel, the sort was not maintained in the Excel. This was fixed. |
| 06913264 | Analytics and Insights | A report loaded slowly when the time frame of the inquiry was long. This was fixed by changing the filter on the report. |
| 06951527 07131807 | Analytics and Insights | If the Analytics Object List contained more than 100 objects, an error message was displayed when exporting. This was fixed. |
| 07144595 | APIs | The Retrieve Collections API does not return Suppressed Collections, but they are included in the Total Record Count. This was fixed. |
| 07141641 | APIs | The GET-Vendor API changes phone information. This was fixed and now the correct data is retrieved and no change is done. |
| 07249076 | Digital Resource Management | Japanese was not displayed in the Alma and Universal Viewers. This was fixed. |
| 07053572 | Digital Resource Management | The grace period fields in a Digital Waitlist analytics report had inaccurate data. This was fixed. |
| 07235364 | Digital Resource Management | The Digital Viewer representation tab displayed the wrong name for PDFs printed from Word documents. This was fixed. |
| 07239608 | Digital Resource Management | The Alma Viewer Quick Access feature was missing tooltips. They were added. |
| 07701091 | Electronic Resource Management | When deleting a portfolio, the focus on the delete action was incorrect. This was fixed and now the action focuses on the record. |
| 07697599 | Electronic Resource Management | When saving repository import profiles with special characters in their name, where the profile had an electronic collection specified for matching records, and the "Import" action was selected upon No Match, an error would appear on the screen. This was fixed. |
| 06963080 | Electronic Resource Management | The Springer Integration job is consistently slower in certain environments. This was fixed and now the job initialization time is significantly decreased. |
| 06479819 06695852 | Electronic Resource Management | There were some cases where individual Community Zone synchronization updates were skipped erroneously. This was fixed. |
| 07131824 | Fulfillment and Resource Sharing | Cancelling requests in Waiting For Remote Storage stopped queued requests from reaching remote storage. This was fixed. |
| 07092630 | Fulfillment and Resource Sharing | In some cases, cancelling a local request caused the item to be left out of the Expired Hold Shelf, since the "Send to Institution" tab was hidden. This was fixed, and now the item can be found under the "Send to Library" or "Send to Circulation Desk" tabs if the "Send to Institution" tab is hidden. |
| 07189819 | Fulfillment and Resource Sharing | Previously, shipping multiple physical items resulted in an error. This was fixed. |
| 07186677 | Fulfillment and Resource Sharing | In some cases, incorrect partners appeared under the Active Partner facet. This was fixed. |
| 07130512 07208257 07039684 | Fulfillment and Resource Sharing | When bulk printing the Receive letter, some information was missing from the letter. This was fixed. |
| 07113480 | Fulfillment and Resource Sharing | There were performance issues when receiving borrowing requests. This was fixed. |
| 07052950 07133334 07165690 07060088 | Fulfillment and Resource Sharing | An incorrect alert, stating that the request had a loan condition, appeared for a borrowing request when there were no terms of use or loan conditions set by the lender. This was fixed. |
| 07131663 | Fulfillment and Resource Sharing | Borrowing requests could not be canceled or deleted. This was fixed. |
| 07087807 07165810 | Fulfillment and Resource Sharing | In some cases, when the Due Date facet value was selected, the value that was displayed did not correspond to the number of requests that appeared after selecting the facet. This was fixed. |
| 07046103 07045156 07113171 | Fulfillment and Resource Sharing | In some cases, requests for multivolume sets caused an immediate Cancellation Letter to be sent. This was fixed. |
| 06807126 | Fulfillment and Resource Sharing | In some cases, a timeout caused error messages for borrowing resource sharing. This was fixed. |
| 06797679 | Fulfillment and Resource Sharing | Customers experienced a long waiting time after selecting the "Resource Sharing Request" button on Primo (not VE), until the request form was loaded. This was fixed and the response time was reduced. |
| 07486665 | Fulfillment and Resource Sharing | Only one barcode was created for a multivolume Borrowing Request. This was fixed. |
| 07684385 07264156 | Fulfillment and Resource Sharing | Previously, some users experienced difficulties when using the Start Communication feature. This was fixed. |
| 07244434 | Fulfillment and Resource Sharing | Previously, requests from the "Download Electronic Resource" page could not be completed. This was fixed. |
| 07489581 | Fulfillment and Resource Sharing | Access to Leganto was blocked based on IP location for a user with an Alma role. This was fixed. |
| 07266742 | Metadata Management | Network Publishing to Primo: Processing of a record with thousands of relations caused the job to fail. This was fixed and now the code was changed to limit the number of handled relations. The current limitation is 1000. |
| 07186503 | Metadata Management | Export Bibliographic Records job: When converting records from MARC to CNMARC and from CNMARC to MARC, sometimes records were not exported. This was fixed. |
| 07066367 | Metadata Management | When performing an "equals" search using terms containing Icelandic diacritics, the search results incorrectly contained "normalized" variants of the Icelandic diacritics. This was fixed. |
| 07130140 | Metadata Management | When performing an advanced search with a term using the "Is Not Empty" option, and then selecting the Network or Community tabs in the search results, the search was instead performed with the "Is Empty" option, leading to incorrect results. This was fixed. |
| 06697887 | Metadata Management | If the "Heading from Bibliographic records" field contained brackets, no records were found using the F3 function. This was fixed. |
| Metadata Management | Metadata Editor Accessibility Issues:
|
|
| 06569291 | Metadata Management | When using an OR statement and multiple conditions were true, the 'then' part of the rule executed as many times as there were true conditions. This issue affected the "addField" and "copyField" flows and has now been resolved. To ensure the rule runs correctly when more than one OR condition is true, you should now use the updated methods: "addFieldOnce" instead of "addField", and "copyFieldOnce" instead of "copyField". These new methods include a special flag to ensure the field is added or copied only once, regardless of how many OR conditions are true. |
| Metadata Management | The Harvesting job failed due to a QueryTimeoutException. This was fixed. | |
| 07687669 07221842 | Metadata Management | Imported numbers in bibliographic records are displayed as a decimal number with many positions after the decimal point. This was fixed. |
| 07079442 | Metadata Management | SBN bibliographic alignments fail to merge records if the preferred record is imported in the same job. This was fixed and the merge action is handled after the import. |
| 07486421 07038458 | Metadata Management | When contributing a UNIMARC bibliographic record with authority links in field 702 to SBN, Alma previously did not set the "Responsabilità" (responsibility) of the authority link in the tipoRespons attribute of the <legameelementoaut> element. This issue has been resolved. Now, the tipoRespons attribute will be set to 0 if the relator code in subfield 4 is one of {060, 260, 280, 290, 320, 390, 420}. For all other relator codes, the tipoRespons attribute will be set to 3. |
| 06966254 | Physical Resource Management | When the default call number type is "#", the first indicator of field 852 in the holdings record remains "#" rather than being converted to a space. This happens when changing the permanent location of an item either with the Physical Item editor, or the Change Physical Items Information job. This was fixed. To enable this fix, set the new customer parameter "replace_hash_call_number_type_with_space" to "true" (default value is "false"). |
| 07058874 07184569 | User Experience, Accessibility & Infrastructure | Alma froze on the analytics pages after logging in with SAML. This was fixed. |
| 07083861 07256722 | User Experience, Accessibility & Infrastructure | When a user logged in to Primo with a social login or an internal login, no 'Successful login - Primo' event (Event Type 9914) was created. This is now fixed, and the event is created as expected for social logins and internal logins. |
| 07135057 | User Experience, Accessibility & Infrastructure | The Icelandic alphabet was not sorted correctly in the receiving workbench. Special characters were treated in the same way as their corresponding regular characters. This was fixed. |
| 07142221 | User Experience, Accessibility & Infrastructure | Searching for users using "Primary Identifier Equals <search term>" did not return exact results. This was fixed. |
| 07708813 | User Experience, Accessibility & Infrastructure | An MFA Auth Setting in Alma led to AUTH Problem in Primo VE (Sandbox). This was fixed. |
| 07692925 | User Experience, Accessibility & Infrastructure | In some cases there were performance issues when the Lean Library plugin was active. This was fixed. |
| 07111367 | User Experience, Accessibility & Infrastructure | For Alma Chat, a letter name (letter_name) change was not reflected in the preview. This was fixed. |
| 07700379 | User Experience, Accessibility & Infrastructure | Augmentation integration profiles could not be deleted in the case of a user id for a user record that did not exist. This was fixed. |
| 07697302 | User Experience, Accessibility & Infrastructure | An error appeared after selecting the validation in the mail handling. This was fixed. |
| 07489581 | User Experience, Accessibility & Infrastructure | In some cases access to Leganto at remote via SAML was blocked for a user with an Alma role. This was fixed. |
| 07083861 07256722 | User Experience, Accessibility & Infrastructure | When a user logged in to Primo with social or internal login, there was no 'Successful login - Primo' event created. This was fixed. |
| 07204252 07256722 | User Experience, Accessibility & Infrastructure | Some users with the General System Administrator role did not receive the "SAML Certificate Expiration Notification Letter" or received it late. This was fixed. |
| 07229072 | User Experience, Accessibility & Infrastructure | In some cases for labels, words with apostrophes were displayed without the apostrophe. This was fixed. |
| 07141641 | User Experience, Accessibility & Infrastructure | The GET-Vendor API incorrectly changed the phone information. This was fixed. |
| 06830187 06977178 | User Experience, Accessibility & Infrastructure | In some cases there were missing fields in the library card detailed loans display. This was fixed. |
| 07264269 | User Experience, Accessibility & Infrastructure | Some integrations did not implement correctly in recent sandbox updates. This was fixed. |
