Recommendations for Early Housekeeping

The suggestions below are excerpts from Getting Ready for Alma and Discovery Implementation, Appendix B - Optional Data Preparations. This appendix can help you decide which clean-up efforts are a priority for your library – not everything will be relevant to all libraries. Examples of other data cleaning could include:

• Library and collection/location names

• Bibliographic, holdings and item data

• Records missing 245 | a

• Enumeration

• Statuses and codes

• Old/inconsistent data (includes old patron records, fines beyond a certain date and/or less than a certain amount; etc.)

• Review of old, unclosed orders

• Patron, vendor, library contact names

• E-resource and package resources

Tags and Identifiers:

To allow for clean migration, ensure collections are well identified. Consistent tagging is important for identifying records that need to be moved from your source collection to specific Alma locations on the migration form.

• It would be most helpful if all items belonging to a particular item group are consistently tagged with the same MARC field/subfield (e.g., subfield tag in 852 or 9XX). For some systems, this may best be accomplished upon export – other systems may need to have edits performed in advance. (Sirsi Colleges cannot see this field only upon export - n/a)

• Through the migration process, Ex Libris maps these MARC tags to an Alma “location” specific to your Institution Zone (IZ). The migration form used will depend upon your source system. For more information read the Generic Alma Data Delivery and Migration Guide OR Symphony to Alma Data Delivery and Migration Guide.

Notes on P2E (Physical to Electronic) Processing

Due to Alma’s database structure, local catalogue records for electronic resources are migrated as physical resources, then changed into electronic resources via Physical to Electronic (P2E) processing. For early housekeeping, this involves the following steps:

• Ensure the links for locally catalogued eResources in your source system are active.

• Consistently identify/tag catalogued eResources in your source database (If not done already). You’ll be mapping these tags to ‘locations’ and identifying these locations as electronic resources on the Alma Location mapping tab. The bibliographic records for these collections will be sent to Ex Libris along with the rest of your collection.

Note that during migration you will be required to create an input file (csv format) of bib record numbers that correspond to the eResource collections that you are migrating from your source system (e.g., from MARC 001). The migration specialists will match this file to the corresponding recently imported bibliographic records in Alma to create electronic portfolios. Once migrated, Ex Libris may guide you to run a job in Alma to update your proxy prefix if changes are made to local authentication policies. Running this job in Alma will update user access via Primo.