Alma Electronic Resources Management

Alma Analytics supports electronic resources management primarily through cost-per-use reports, Alma link resolver usage reports, expenditure, and electronic inventory data.

The reporting in Analytics is only as good as the data available in Alma. For the cost-per-use reports, in particular, Alma uses cost information stored in POLs and COUNTER report data. If you plan to use the Analytics functionality in Alma, it's important to keep COUNTER reports up to date across vendors and publishers and use the full functionality of acquisitions in Alma. Otherwise, generated reports will be skewed to only include the resources with COUNTER or acquisitions data available in Alma, or will include fields with empty or null values.

Especially for vendors that do not supply COUNTER-compliant usage data, the Alma link resolver data available in Analytics is a helpful alternative for measure usage.

Finally, please note that you'll need the role of Design Analytics to create new reports in Analytics.

The Electronic Cost Usage Dashboard in Alma Analytics offers a variety of cost-per-use reports and similar value-driven reports for publishers, platforms, and electronic resources.

Cost-per-use reports are available for one-time and continuing electronic collections and electronic portfolios as well as reports for funds, platforms, vendors, titles, LC and Dewey subject areas, and resource types with the lowest cost-per-use and therefore greatest perceived value.

To access these out of the box reports are available by navigating to the Catalog menu, Shared Folders, Alma, and Electronic Cost Usage Dashboard in Alma Analytics:

Alma Analytics offers a series of reports in the Usage via COUNTER Reports and Usage via COUNTER Reports - Release 5 dashboards, which display trends, most used, and least used resources, platforms, and publishers according to COUNTER R4 and COUNTER R5 data. These reports can be modified using the steps outlined below in the Basic Tips to Working with Reports in Alma Analytics box. The reports available for Release 5 COUNTER data are far fewer in number because Alma so recently became COUNTER Release 5 compliant.

The Usage via Alma Link Resolver dashboard provides a series of reports to analyze Alma link resolver usage.

The following reports in particular are helpful to measure value:

• Top ten title accesses via OpenURL requests in the previous year
  • Top ten most requested titles via Alma link resolver in the previous year
  • Most in demand titles in the last year
  • Edit the report filters to see a different date range or more than the top ten title accesses
• Top ten title accesses via OpenURL requests without services in the previous year
  • Top ten most requested titles via Alma link resolver in the previous year without services (i.e. full text available in another resource)
  • Number and percent of requests without services as well as the total number of requests for the title
• Top ten requests
  • Platforms with the greatest number of requests for full text access; the platforms users are seeking to access via the Alma link resolver for full text access

Tip #1: Always use the Save As function and save reports to My Folders:

Tip #2: Some reports are prepopulated to retrieve data for a particular date range. Follow these steps to modify the date range:

• In the filter section, use the edit icon (pencil) to revise the Request Date fields.

• Enter the desired dates and click Ok

• Updating the date filter for desired date range will correct the report data, but the title of the report will also have to be revised:

• Use the edit icon (pencil) to revise the subtitle of the report. Enter the desired subtitle in the Subtitle field and click Done (top right corner).

Tip #3: Many of the reports in Alma Analytics retrieve data from the past year or past three years. Follow these steps to modify the past years of covered data:

• Edit the report and in the Filters section, modify the Request Year. The number after the minus sign determines how many years of past data is used in the report. In this example, the one previous year. Change the number of add or reduce the amount of past years' data used in the report.

Tip #4: Edit the "top ten" reports to include more than the top 10 results by following these steps:

• In the Filter section, edit the Number of Requests is in top 10 field using the edit icon (pencil) to include the desired number of top requests.

• This revised example will include the top 50 requests: