Page Comparison

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Recommendations

1. For

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1. all materials

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For counts of items added or withdrawn by fiscal year, options include:

• For Added :

  • Use “Physical Items“.”Physical Item Details”.”Lifecycle” = Active AND

  • Use “Physical Items”.”Item Creation Date” OR

  • Use “Physical Items”.”Item Receiving Date” and research significant impacts at San Diego, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Francisco, and Santa Barbara when dates are added into the data extract in Alma Analytics.

• For Withdrawn:

  • Use “Physical Items”.”Item Modification Date” = Deleted and/or None or NULL AND

  • Find out reasons behind the usage of the Deleted value AND/OR

  • Harmonize on a field and values for deletion notes

Note: ExLibris is reviewing the differences in counts when dates are used in Analytics reports as of May, 2023.

Impact

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Stakeholder group

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Impact

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UC Libraries

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Determinations around what and how we report are for the most part managed/owned by the UC Libraries (i.e., shared ownership).

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CDL

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CDL analysts, who are responsible for building report queries at the Network Zone according to templates agreements upon by the UC Libraries, will have to exclude items and titles based a variety of date parameters.

Reasoning

After review, the AASA-PT Harmonization group determined that

Background

The AASA-PT Harmonization group reviewed all the UCOP statistics data that can be retrieved via Alma Analytics. Factors considered during this review were the existing UCOP, ACRL and ARL requirements.

• UCOP statistical reporting are collected for risk management purposes.

• ARL reporting guidelines would like institutions to be consistent with their reporting.

• ACRL and ARL reporting requirements focus on catalogued material.

• CEAL reporting requirements ask about both catalogued and un-catalogued material

UCOP and ARL statistics ask for statistics for a snapshot in time: usually, it’s the end of the most recent fiscal year. Therefore, campuses have in the past used various approaches to exclude any material added after the end of the fiscal year when running reports after that date. For example, a report run on August 1 would be set up to exclude material added after July 1. Alma Analytics has a variety of date fields in records for physical items. However, these fields each have a variety of drawbacks for several reasons, e.g., campus procedures, migration artifacts, and other data issues. (Review found acceptable levels of inconsistently clean data in the context of a system with over 40 million physical item records.) The following variables were reviewed :

• Physical Items

  • Lifecycle

  • Item Creation Date v. Creation Date

  • Item Receiving Date v. Receiving Date v. Receiving Date (Calendar)

  • Item Modification Date v. Modification Date

Other variables were also reviewed and considered but they played minor roles for the build. They included locations, item policies, call numbers, etc.

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1. : account for Alma date variable quirks. Adjust queries to account for migration artifacts and inconsistent behavior for date variables due to Alma’s method of manipulating and storing date variables.

2. For physical materials: use “Physical Items”.”Item Creation Date”

3. For electronic materials: use “Activation Date”

Impact

Reasoning

After review, the AASA-PT Harmonization group determined that

Background

The AASA-PT Harmonization group reviewed all the UCOP statistics data that can be retrieved via Alma Analytics. Factors considered during this review were the existing UCOP, ACRL and ARL requirements.

• UCOP statistical reporting are collected for risk management purposes.

• ARL reporting guidelines would like institutions to be consistent with their reporting.

• ACRL and ARL reporting requirements focus on catalogued material.

• CEAL reporting requirements ask about both catalogued and un-catalogued material

UCOP and ARL statistics ask for statistics for a snapshot in time: usually, it’s the end of the most recent fiscal year. Therefore, campuses have in the past used various approaches to exclude any material added after the end of the fiscal year when running reports after that date. For example, a report run on August 1 would be set up to exclude material added after July 1. Alma Analytics has a variety of date fields in records for physical items. However, these fields each have a variety of drawbacks for several reasons, e.g., campus procedures, migration artifacts, and other data issues. (Review found acceptable levels of inconsistently clean data in the context of a system with over 40 million physical item records.) The following variables were reviewed :

• Physical Items

  • Lifecycle

  • Item Creation Date v. Creation Date

  • Item Receiving Date v. Receiving Date v. Receiving Date (Calendar)

  • Item Modification Date v. Modification Date

Other variables were also reviewed and considered but they played minor roles for the build. They included locations, item policies, call numbers, etc.

Observations about the current data:

For counts of items added or withdrawn by fiscal year, options include:

• For Added :

  • Use “Physical Items“.”Physical Item Details”.”Lifecycle” = Active AND

  • Use “Physical Items”.”Item Creation Date” OR

  • Use “Physical Items”.”Item Receiving Date” and research significant impacts at San Diego, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Francisco, and Santa Barbara when dates are added into the data extract in Alma Analytics.

• For Withdrawn:

  • Use “Physical Items”.”Item Modification Date” = Deleted and/or None or NULL AND

  • Find out reasons behind the usage of the Deleted value AND/OR

  • Harmonize on a field and values for deletion notes

Note: ExLibris is reviewing the differences in counts when dates are used in Analytics reports as of May, 2023.

Physical Items

• Lifecycle

  • Three values are available for “Physical Items“.”Physical Item Details”.”Lifecycle”:

    • Active items are active and discoverable in Primo.

    • Deleted items are not discoverable.

    • None items are not discoverable. These records are also associated with records without creation dates and possibly other pertinent metadata; consultation with Ex Libris is ongoing.

  • For withdrawn counts, filtering based on lifecycle = “Deleted” and/or “None” causes:

    • Exclusion of items that were deleted from the repository after the reporting deadline but before the report run date. For example, if a weeding project happens in August 2023 and hundreds of print items and their associated records are removed, a report looking for the items from before July 2023 that runs in October 2023 will exclude those items, even though they were still in the collection before July 2023.

    • Inclusion of items deleted because they were added by mistake, but that do not actually represent items that were removed from the collection. To account for this type of deleted item would require a change to harmonized approaches, revised local procedures, or both.

• Modification Date

  • There are two modification date options:

    • “Physical Items”.”Item Modification Date”, which cleans up and harmonizes the value available in “Physical Items”.”Physical Items Details”.”Modification Date”. ExLibris documentation says: “The Item Modification date is the date of the last change to the item. Therefore, if on January 19, 2016 the item was in process type Acquisition, on January 20, 2016 the item was in process type Request, and on January 21, 2016 the item was in process type Loan (and no additional change to the item was made after January 21), the Item Modification Date is January 21, 2016.“

    • “Physical Items”.”Physical Items Details”.”Modification Date”, which allows us to know when the item record is modified. ExLibris documentation says it “Holds the date the physical item was modified“.

  • Alma Analytics data-based findings:

    • When crossed with Lifecycle = Delete, modification dates can be useful to determine and account for items withdrawn from the collection (see Prototype Version 1 at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IBV9tKyvO3xq-UZeuLoeEViSmBwgp2YO/edit#gid=552748451 ). However, due to the problems noted in the Lifecycle section of this decision page, certain institutions are requesting to opt out of reporting annual add and withdrawal counts in statistical reporting.

  • Based on the reported knowledge and practices, “Physical Items”.”Item Modification Date” would be the best variable to use to determine when the items' records were last modified, especially when the record of the item was deleted.

• Creation Date

  • Automatic date and time stamps for when records are created are a norm in relational databases. In Alma physical items, there are two creation dates:

    • “Physical Items”.”Item Creation Date”, which cleans up and harmonizes the value available in “Physical Items”.”Physical Items Details”.”Creation Date.” ExLibris documentation says this “Stores the item creation date in a date format such as 2/29/2014” and that “All date dimensions include dates up to and including 30 years back and 20 years forward. So, for example, if today is March 17, 2021: The earliest loan date that would appear is March 17, 1991. The latest due date that would appear is March 17, 2041.“).

    • “Physical Items”.”Physical Items Details”.”Creation Date”, which allows us to know when the record on the item was created. ExLibris documentation says that this “Holds the date the physical item was created” and that “This date is assigned by Alma when the physical item is created.“

  • Note: ExLibris documentation is questionable based on Alma Analytics data-based findings.

• Alma Analytics data-based findings:

  • Initial findings in usage of creation date is documented at https://docs.google.com/document/d/125dx-__jZOHNRH0ysuRLtEr1j33HjV7e/; summarizing that there are ongoing additional records with no or blank creation dates provided over time. Therefore, setting Creation Date = NULL as a data-extract-, report-development cleanup and the like or filter will not provide accurate counts of how many records were created in each specific, non-NULL fiscal year and/or date ranges. This impacts at least 14% (4.9 million records of this finding out of the 34+ million total amount of records made available in Alma Analytics) of the records. This finding continues to be an ongoing issue (see https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12B7ICBG4DLiViDerm4EwN1Y5BtKByngn/).

  • Recent findings from comparing inclusion and exclusion of creation date in report design criteria show that significant records are dropped when dates such as Creation Date is included. Compare https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IBV9tKyvO3xq-UZeuLoeEViSmBwgp2YO/edit#gid=552748451 where Creation Date is included against https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eoN1qFGTYA4JQG_SY89UvhznCvgGZj6w/ where Creation Date is excluded. See Table 3.

  • Based on the following and our knowledge of the campuses' current practices, “Physical Items”.”Item Creation Date” would be the best variable to use, if reporting counts of items added into the catalog by fiscal year and/or a particular date range is needed:

    • “Physical Items”.”Physical Items Details”.”Creation Date” is the raw data transferred from Alma to Alma Analytics.

    • “Physical Items”.”Item Creation Date” is the harmonization/data cleanup processed variable based on the Physical Items.Physical Items Details.Creation Date.

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