The Alma PWG continues working the Alma community and Ex Libris. Some highlights of what we’re working on lately follow.
Enhancement process
There are over 500 enhancements for Alma in NERS. That’s far too many for users or the PWG enhancement groups to go through each year. Many are no longer valid and some are likely duplicates, phrased just a little differently. The PWG proposed archiving most of the enhancements off NERS at ELUNA and IGeLU meetings. This met with no dissent, so we will move on archiving all 2015 and 2016 enhancements except top 20 from each year off NERS. All new enhancements entered since the last enhancement cycle will also remain in NERS. New enhancements may be entered into NERS any time, but use of Idea Exchange is also encouraged. The next official 2017 enhancement cycle will start in February. We are working on better instructions for entering enhancements into NERS.
Alma UX
The following institutions have been working with Ex Libris on the redesign of the Alma interface since May.
| · State Library of Queensland |
| · University of Wisconsin |
| · Northwestern |
| · University of Tennessee, Knoxville |
| · Getty Research Institute |
| · University of Mannheim |
| · Leuven |
| · Monash |
A public update on the redesign was provided on October 6. The recording for that session can be found here. The next public update will be in early December. Representatives from each institution are invited to Ex Libris headquarters in February for hands-on testing. Public release of the phase 1 work will be in the first half of 2017.
Authentication Focus Group
At the 2016 IGeLU meeting, Ex Libris announced that they want all Alma user authentication to move to the use of external passwords as a security best practice. A joint ELUNA/IGeLU Autentication Focus Group was formed to assess the use of internal passwords and impact of change and then to work collaboratively with Ex Libris to develop a set of solutions for the community. An assessment survey was sent to users in early November. Members of the group are:
- Mark Dehmlow (co-chair)
- Michael North (co-chair)
- Paul Joseph
- Allen Jones
- Masud Khokar
- Dave Allen
- Betsy Friesen
Betsy Friesen
Coordinator, Alma PWG