2025-03-24 Meeting Notes

General Check-In

• discuss Alma release notes (if any)

• discuss anything relevant from All-Chairs

5

All

• Meeting notes from ALL CHAIRS:

Meeting was canceled

SILS Townhall

Consortial Blocks made the list

SILS Town Hall meeting, chat log, and transcript available in this folder:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1iaFhMjj_BNX_eDLRYQUUAQaCcYC_6YZ_?usp=drive_link

Damaged AFN item form/process

5

Sandra

Damaged Item form & process

Next Step:

• Received reply to email sent to operations team, they will get back to us

Next Step:

AFN Billing Practices

• Will dedicate the next meeting to this agenda item only

5

Everyone

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RCbMonyXuYYhMsbgvFoIjwmn74hzdI0jBy58Q59qk_A/edit?usp=sharing

Last time:

• For each campus Billing contact page, have all contact info and billing pages linked so users can find out how to pay their bills. 

• Review all letters and discuss potential to make similar wording choices across our letters.

Next steps:

@Sandra Farfan-Gracia will share minutes from meetings with the group

Option to Share Operator Name Across the Fulfillment Network

February 2025 Fulfillment and Resource Sharing =

Institutions in a Fulfillment Network can now opt-in to share the name of their operators who have put items of another institution in transit. This improves transparency, and enables owning institutions more clarity on who at their partner institution is the last person to have handled items they own.

Note This option is turned off by default.

The operator name displays in the following locations:

• Resource Request Monitoring

• General tab of the Physical Item Editor (right hand information pane)

• History tab of the Physical Item Editor (for Item

Questions to consider:

1. In what instances would you find this helpful?

2. Do we make the recommendation to opt in and provide guidance?

3. Should we harmonize our approach? If yes, do we need a subgroup to include RS?

4. Does F-OST have the ability to draft guidance on communication within the AFN.

5. Should we draft guidance on how to communicate to other campuses when investigating an AFN issue?

If we decide to harmonize our approach, here’s points to consider:

1. Have campus reach out to main contact email, then they can investigate further. Do not reach out directly to operator.

2. Never share names or operator info to patrons

@Sandra Farfan-Gracia will contact Kristen to decide if a subgroup needs to be formed or just share the decision page with RS for feedback

Manage Patron Services New UI

Will keep this agenda item until end of May

https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Alma/Release_Notes/2024/October_2024/November_2024_Feature_Sneak_Preview

• Mandatory in May https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Alma/Product_Documentation/010Alma_Online_Help_(English)/030Fulfillment/040Circulation_Desk_Operations/040Managing_Patron_Services

New Patron UI 

• Seems to be slower (all).

• Scan in issues, not returning in patron accounts (UCB)

Non-Alma Billing Practices

• Subgroup for Non-Alma discussion with RS: volunteers are Mark, Sahra, and Sandra

5

Sandra

Group will take a pause until Tipasa has been live for at least 1 year

Walk-Ons

• Ingred: UC Irvine and Merced - occasional issue with direct checkouts by these users at UCSD. Stub record does not work because there is no expiration or purge date in their records.

  • Sahra: Solution is to enter an arbitrary date (one year later) and proceed with checkout. 

• Ross: how are we determining expiration and purge dates when they’re imported into Alma?

• UCB: purge is set one year beyond expiration date.

  • UCB does not automatically purge, does manually at end of June for all inactive accounts 2+years after their expiration.

Wrap up/Topics for next time

5

All

parking lot:

• Ongoing letter maintenance. Is there value in doing ongoing maintenance of letters; maybe quarterly? Make sure that each campus is sending consistent messaging. Related to the text that we word-smithed in the line above. 3/11 - Will leave on agenda for a few meeting cycles and revisit after decision page for On Hold Shelf letter is finalized.

For future discussion:

• Each campus should share what we use for ID cards: Mag Swipe, Barcode, RFID, Mobile ID, etc. Discuss how we can provide better service to users who borrow materials outside of their home campus. Potential mix of staff training and user education?