This section provides an overview of the decisions that college staff need to make in preparation for making configuration changes in Alma to support peer to peer resource sharing and a summary of the roles required for making configuration changes and performing resource sharing activities in Alma.
In “Alma-speak” an institution contains libraries. Libraries within an institution may be configured to have relationships where they enable patrons to check in or check out resources at another location or send items back and forth. If a library is configured to do this for libraries at other institutions (and not only within the institution), it is known as a resource sharing library.
Each college will need to designate only one library in their Alma institution as the resource sharing library.
Using an Existing Resource Sharing Library
Each college may decide whether use an existing library as their resource sharing library. For example, a college with multiple campuses that each have a library with dedicated ILL staff may want to select a different option.
Using a Virtual Resource Sharing Library
Every institutional instance of Alma also comes with a default library that is called "Resource Sharing Library" out of the box. This can't be deleted but does not need to be the resource sharing library you use. Colleges with multiple campuses may choose to use this library as a virtual resource sharing library.
Further discussion of which resource sharing library option would be best suited for your library can be found in the following recordings:
Locations: Identify Locations in in your library’s collections that will be available for resource sharing and Locations that will not be available. For example, stacks-main library, stacks-satellite library. Locations such as reference, reserves, media, tech, and children’s, are likely items that will not be available for resource sharing.
Fulfillment Unit: Make a note of the Fulfillment Unit for each Location in the list of Locations that will be available for resource sharing and the list of Locations that will not be available.
Exceptions: Once you have determined your Locations, there may be a subset of items within a Location that you would like to exclude. For example, popular non-fiction may be included in stacks, but you may prefer not to make popular non-fiction available for resource sharing. You can exclude such items from resource sharing with an item policy or material type.
These items should be identified by one of the following:
If this subset is not identified by one of these two exception parameters, you should apply the classification before configuring resource sharing in Alma.
Identify user groups that you would like to exclude from resource sharing, for example community borrowers.
Pre-set configurations for resource sharing policies will be available to colleges in the networked environment. Each college can choose to use these pre-set configurations or apply their own set of configurations for resource sharing policies.
Distributed Policies
Note that these resource sharing policies will only apply to materials lent to and borrowed to from other institutions. They will not change lending and borrowing policies with patrons within your own institution.
Additional Alma settings found in Resource Sharing Customer Parameters will impact the user experience and staff workflow for resource sharing. You can find the details of each parameter by going to Configuration > Fulfillment > Other Settings. Hover over free text description to see the details of each parameter. Determine which parameters should be set to “true” and which to “false”, etc. for your institution.
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Roles Required to Complete Configurations |
Roles Required for Resource Sharing Activities |
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Note: A Fulfillment Services Operator or Fulfillment Services Manager role scoped to the resource sharing library is required for performing resource sharing activities in Alma (e.g. accessing the Borrowing and Lending Requests task lists).
It will be necessary to make the following decisions for your library before starting to apply configuration settings in your Alma environment. Instructions in this section are intended to support decision-making in your library.