The recording of the latest Alma acquisitions exchange of experience for EPUG members is now available:

Adam Robinson, who is the head of Academic Services, and Heather Cripps, who is the Content Delivery Officer at Derby, talked to EPUG-UKI about the successful integration between Alma and Oracle.

The Content and Digital Services team within the Library at the University of Derby are one of the first teams within the UK HE sector to implement an integration between the Library Management System (Alma) and the University finance system (Oracle). This innovative piece of work has enabled the team to save valuable staff time on double entry in both systems, minimise reconciliation activity between systems, and enhance accuracy within expenditure tracking and streamline the budgeting reporting process. The Alma-Oracle project involved collaboration across departments at the University, including Finance and I.T teams, and was spearheaded by the Library. This work was challenging and took considerable time and effort to come to fruition. Significant time was spent analysing return on investment, communicating and explaining complex acquisition workflows and financial procedures.

The Library team at Derby have confidence that the financial information within Alma is reflective of the information contained within the University Finance system, and staff are able to focus their efforts in other priority activities.

With thanks to Kevin O’Donovan from LSE for organising the topic and speaker.

The recording of July’s exchange of experience on Alma acquisitions for EPUG members is now available via YouTube

This session focused on fiscal year rollover, troubleshooting issues in preparation for 2025-2026, and sharing rollover knowledge. There was also some discussion about what everyone is doing in Alma to prepare for potential walkaways from Big 5 deals.

The next session will take place on 11th September at 11am – please contact Leah Emary (Leah.Emary@sunderland.ac.uk) if you’d like the Teams invite to attend. More details on the Acquisitions call are available on the EPUG website and recordings of all past sessions are available on a YouTube playlist

The recording of yesterday’s CERV voting discussion meeting for EPUG members is now available to watch.

The following enhancements were flagged up during the call as being of most interest to attendees:

• AENH-I-36426 – Display user blocks on request screen (mentioned by Duncan Jones (University of Oxford))
• AENH-I-36487 – Record all changes to an Electronic Collection in the History tab with meaningful Old Value and New Value information (mentioned by Lee Houghton (Nottingham Trent University))
• AENH-I-36485 – Improve Alma records with accurate information on staff activity (mentioned by Lee Houghton)
• AENH-I-36414 – Ability to designate items as “Unavailable” (mentioned by Duncan Jones: was decided against at Institution (currently using Work Order workaround))
• AENH-I-36405 – Update Due Date When a User Account Expires (mentioned by Melanie Peters-Turner (University of Law))
• AENH-I-36357 – Improve Alma Job Reports for Failed Records (mentioned by Melanie Peters-Turner, Lee Houghton, Duncan Jones (Institution chose not to vote))
• AENH-I-36332 – Catalog search – “Did you mean?” to manage situations like “&” vs “and” (mentioned by Melanie Peters-Turner)
• AENH-I-36297 – Support full SIP2 protocol (mentioned by Lee Houghton)
• AENH-I-36286 – Ability to Delete Patron/User Account Notes in Batch by Set (mentioned by Lee Houghton)

EPUG UK&I will be hosting an in-person day focused on E-Resources & Content, hosted by the University of Salford on Tuesday 20^th May, 10am-4pm.

Tamar Ganor (Content Product Manager, Clarivate) will be joining us for the day and there will be an opportunity to ask questions and for discussion directly with Tamar. The day is intended to follow up on some of the themes and issues raised during the E-Resources Day held in Leicester in September 2024. 

• Programme for the day (registration has now closed)

Please contact epuguki.secretary@gmail.com if you require any further information, or have any questions.

Kind regards,

EPUG UK&I Committee

(Lee, Laurence, Amanda, Sally & Scott)

Dear EPUG-UKI colleagues,

Registration is now open for this year’s AGM & Spring conference event. This year the event will be split across 2 days, Tuesday 29^th April (1.30-4.30pm) & Wednesday 30^th April (9.30am-12.30pm), and will take place remotely via Zoom.

See the event programme below (subject to change):

There is an opportunity to submit questions for Ex Libris & Clarivate colleagues. Please do this by Tuesday 22nd April either as part of your registration or by emailing epuguki.secretary@gmail.com.

This year, we are also planning to offer an informal networking session at the end of the conference on Wednesday 30th April. Please let us know in your registration if you’d be interested in joining this.

This is an online event, via a Zoom webinar, and joining details will be mailed out after registering. Feel free to share details of this event within your service/institution – being an online event means colleagues can dip in and out of sessions that are of interest to them. The event will also be recorded and made available shortly afterwards.

Amanda Swann
EPUG-UKI Secretary, on behalf of the Committee

Save the date: 29^th and 30^th April

We are pleased to update that we will be holding our Spring conference this year on Tuesday 29^th April (1-4.30pm) & Wednesday 30^th April (9.30am-12.30pm), which will be held online over Zoom.

Thanks to those of you who responded to the survey we sent out before Christmas asking for attendance preferences – after reviewing the responses, we have decided to host both our Spring and Autumn conferences this year as online only events, and hopefully return to at least 1 in person/hybrid event next year. Only a small number of respondents indicated that they would be able to attend in person (in either location mentioned) and from reading the additional comments, it seems travel & training budgets are particularly restrictive this year across the HE sector, so hosting as online seems a more effective use of resources this year.

Many of you did mention the value of in person for networking and we’re planning ways we can incorporate some element of networking into the spring event – any suggestions on this welcome.

Call for speakers

We are also looking for speakers! Please get in touch with epuguki.secretary@gmail.com by Friday 21^st February if you’d like to present in April. This can be on any aspect of Ex Libris products or systems such as:

• Alma, Primo (VE/BO), Leganto, Rialto, Rapido, Rapid ILL
• Recent system implementations, migrations, or integrations with external systems
• Projects reviewing workflows within the Ex Libris systems
• New features you’ve recently enabled or tested
• User engagement/UX studies
• Innovative use of systems, features, or data e.g. analytics, Linked Open Data, AI

Presentations can be between 20-45 mins in length (please specify the preferred length of your presentation) and new/first-time presenters are welcome.

We hope to open registration at the end of February.

Future in person/themed days

Although we have made the decision to host both larger conferences online this year, the EPUG committee does have funds to be able to support smaller in person days. Some suggestions for ways this could be done included:

• Regional networking days – aimed at EPUG members within a certain area of the UK or Ireland and providing an opportunity to network whilst minimising travel costs for institutions
• Training days themed around a specific topic or issue
  • Investigating whether Ex Libris could potentially run one of their premium sessions for EPUG members

If you would be interested in hosting an in person day at your own institution with support from EPUG-UKI, please contact epuguki.secretary@gmail.com

Kind regards,

Amanda (on behalf of the EPUG UKI Committee)

The recording of December’s Q&A-based call is now available to watch. All previous session recordings are also available via a YouTube playlist.

Contact Leah Emary (Leah.Emary@sunderland.ac.uk) directly to be added to the calendar invitation for upcoming meetings or to find out more.

The recording of the October session of the Acquisitions Exchange of Experience group is now available to watch (embedded below). All previous session recordings are available via a YouTube playlist.

This month’s session focused on the EBSCONET API integration with Alma. Kath Halfpenny (University of Liverpool) presented on the configuration and set-up of the EBSCONET API and how this works with subscription orders in EBSCONET and Alma.

The next session will take place on Wednesday 11th December (2pm). Instead of having a speaker this time, we’ll just be asking any questions or addressing any issues you may have. If you would like to pose a question to the group, please add it to the bottom of our shared agenda. There are a number of questions there already so please add comments or have a think in advance of the call if you can share your experience or set up.

Contact Leah Emary (Leah.Emary@sunderland.ac.uk) directly to be added to the calendar invitation for upcoming meetings or to find out more.

Thank you to everyone who attended last week’s AGM – it was great to see so many of you joining over the day. We also look forward to seeing some of you in person at our planned hybrid event in October at the British Library…watch this space for a save the date.

Recordings from the AGM will shortly be made available and we’ll be contacting attendees with a short feedback survey.

In the meantime, there are a couple of other updates:

Joint Ex Libris/Jisc update about KB+ collections – Thursday 16th May 3.30pm

Following the closure of Jisc’s KB+ service in February, Ex Libris and Jisc have been working together to update information about collections in the Ex Libris KnowledgeBases.

Tamar Ganor from Ex Libris and Jonathan Blaney from Jisc have kindly agreed to deliver a joint session to update the UK community on progress with the transition away from KB+, and next steps for the project. The session will be delivered via Teams on Thursday 16th May 3:30 – 4pm UK time.

A link to the session has been sent round the EPUG-UKI mailing lists, but please contact the committee if you need the link sending on.

Acquisitions Exchange of Experience April meeting recording

The recording of the latest Acquisitions Exchange of Experience, which took place on 17th April, is now available (embedded below). All session recordings are available via a YouTube playlist.

The April session focused on Electronic Resource Management (ERM) in Alma, with a presentation from David Rowe (UWE) on their experiences with ERM implementation so far.