Best Practices: Recording Perpetual Access in Alma

Background: Perpetual rights and entitlement tracking in Alma DRAFT

Resources:

CDL data available to support campuses perpetual rights tracking for Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 acquisitions.

• Redacted licenses: https://cdlib.org/services/collections/licensed/resources/redacted-license-agreements/

• Transferred titles: https://cdlib.org/services/collections/licensed/resources/transferred-journals-titles/

• Title list: https://cdlib.org/services/collections/licensed/resources/publisher-package-details-title-lists-at-time-of-renewal/

• There are cases, where resources have not been kept up to date, perhaps as a result of a change in legacy practices following the July 2021 UC Library Network migration.

License categories for post-cancellation access (PCA)
University of Minnesota-Minneapolis executed a retrospective analysis of all licenses and found most agreements could be grouped into the following categories for post-cancellation access (PCA):

• third-party preservation entities (e.g., Portico)

• delivered (e.g., jump drive)

• vendor hosted and some with fees

• rolling PCA allowed access to the most recent five years of content, so with every year of subscription more and more content would become inaccessible.

  (Sunshine Carter, “The perpetual access rights ‘problem’,” ELUNA Annual Meeting, Spokane, WA, May 3, 2018, https://documents.el-una.org/id/eprint/1706/ (accessed 5 April 2023)

Alma functionality
Facilitates licenses associated with corresponding portfolios. Given local campuses may also license the same journal as CDL, with different coverage dates, this creates a more complex record keeping process. UCSC has developed a workflow distinguishing local access versus CDL coverage.

There may also be cases where a local campus will have a journal portfolio with different date coverage pertaining to two different access types. It is then necessary to have duplicate portfolios with one indicating the perpetual or perpetual and current access and the other with access type none for the coverage dates not covered under perpetual access licensing terms. University of Minnesota-Minneapolis used two different electronic collections for very large sets of journals to group like terms for perpetual access. This was also communicated out to faculty for awareness in selecting course materials with greater potential for sustained long-term access.

Once perpetual access record keeping is undertaken, an necessary prerequisite is to consider is Working with the Community Zone Updates Task List. Once a portfolio or bib record contains perpetual access records (MARC 857), a review of automatic functions needs to be conducted in order to prevent deleting activated resources inadvertently, causing a loss of the record with perpetual access entitlements. This can happen when a journal transfers from one vendor to another. Given the Transfer Code of Practice, participating vendors will honor access to the remaining active subscription, which may move in part or whole during the change over between the transferring publisher and the receiving publisher.

Steps in Alma for using the same CZ portfolio to track perpetual coverage

1. (optional) Leave closed IZ POL attached to electronic portfolio/collection. Add a Note indicating the perpetual/post cancellation access

2. Set the IZ electronic portfolio/collection to “Not Available”

3. Set Access Type to “Perpetual” at either the portfolio or collection level (General tab)

4. Enter Perpetual Date Information on Coverage tab

5. (optional) Add Note “Deactivated so it won't override the CDL coverage”

Example

Open

How to find duplicate activations

Identifying eBooks and eJournals in an IZ that are also activated in NZ