Collaborative Futures Mini Conferences

Carleton University's "Better Record" Project: Sharing Progress and Future Goals

Carleton University is engaged in a large-scale remediation project targeting legacy records. These records were held back from WorldCat and the Collaborative Futures Network Zone when we migrated to Alma and have been the focus of remediation work ever since. Through this project, more than 48,000 records were updated and shared during its first phase, including improved versions of almost 24,000 records already in the Network Zone. This presentation will focus on the workflows and tools developed for this project — including their application for other tasks — and ongoing work to address Carleton's remaining legacy data.

OCUL Interlibrary Loan Request Form Update 

The Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Request Form is a form that OCUL's email partners use to create lending requests to OCUL institutions. Before this update, submissions would be sent to the requested OCUL institution via email, which would then have to be manually inputted into that institution's Alma instance. This is a slow process as library workers need to copy and paste each value from the email to Alma, then search for the specific item in their catalogue.

This presentation will describe an update to the ILL Request Form that solves this issue and how the updated form handles requests in certain cases. It will also detail the new workflow, the use of APIs, and more.

All of our problems: Summarizing 3 years of Brock's Omni 'Report a Problem' form

In early 2022, Brock University Library implemented a 'Report a Problem' form in our instance of Omni, allowing users to report any issues they were encountering. We now have three years’ worth of reported problems that can potentially show trends in the issues that users are running into while accessing Omni.

This presentation will provide a high-level overview of the data collected from these problem reports — how many problems are being reported, what types of broad categories they fall into, and any notable trends that we can identify. It will also highlight some changes implemented to address commonly reported issues.

Making claims count: Enhancing workflow efficiency using Alma's claims list

The University of Waterloo Libraries were reactive in their claiming which caused inefficiencies in the physical subscriptions workflow, resulting in missed publications past the available claim window. Alma provides a claims list to proactively identify resources in claim based on vendor and prediction pattern information. With only Alma documentation to learn from, two staff at the University of Waterloo worked together to use the Alma claims list to do a major order cleanup, identify problem orders, and review claiming frequency concerns. Throughout the presentation, we will share how the Alma claims list has become the University of Waterloo Libraries' proactive measure in identifying print items that need to be claimed. Additionally, we will share how we now manage claims through Alma and best practices implemented for claims going forward. While the focus was mainly on our print resources, Alma claims can be used to monitor a delay in receiving and activating electronic resources, too!

Is deduping a kind of overlap analysis? Can you model it in Analytics?

The University of Toronto Libraries are always thinking about ways of understanding overlap within our own collection. Because I work in both Analytics and Primo it occurred to me that there is an existing process in Primo that brings together titles in Alma that are (maybe) the same: Deduping, which among other things brings together print and electronic records for the same titles to make the results list easier for users to navigate. I realized that if I could replicate the deduping process in analytics, I could both use it to support our overlap analysis and to better understand how records are being brought together. It wasn't a total success, but I learned a lot in the attempt! In this presentation I'll break down my goals, taking attendees through what I tried and learned.