Naomi Johnston 0:00 For everyone who's just joining us: Welcome. We're going to get started in just a minute or two here at 11:30. But while you're waiting, Jenny posted links to all of the upcoming reports webinars in the chat. So you can scroll through and take a look at what's coming up throughout the rest of this week. Jennifer Lund 0:21 Okay, so I have the time as 11:30. So I'll go ahead and get started. I'm Jennifer Lund. I'm the convener of the Circulation Reports Group, I want to welcome you all to the Circulation Reports webinar. I'm just going to give you a little bit background about the Reports Group. We were formed last summer, we spent the academic year evaluating Alma's out of the box reports and reports from other institutions. We surveyed the consortium to prioritize data needs, with the caveat that we were seeking to meet data needs not recreate the Aleph wheel. members were invited to test reports and provide feedback That survey is still open, and you can search your email for in MnPALS-Discuss to find that survey. We'll share that in the chat as well. Um, our final task as a as a group is to share out to all MnPALS members. So that all week we're offering sessions by function area. You can see those sessions on the PALS calendar and I also posted the information in chat. These sessions will be recorded for the and available for those who are unable to attend the live sessions. Please submit your questions via chat. We will answer those questions at the end of the presentation. I will now turn over the session to our hosts Naomi, Erin and Jill. Naomi Johnston 1:46 Welcome everybody. My name is Naomi Johnston. I am a technician at Dakota County Technical College, mostly working in circulation and I joined on with the Reports Work Group last summer and I'll be talking A little bit more later, but I'll let Erin introduce herself too. Erin Balerud 2:04 Hey, everybody. I'm Erin Balerud. I'm the circulation technician at MSU. Morehead. And I've been in the Reports Work Group since we convened last summer and working mostly in circulation as well. So I think Naomi's gonna take it away first with some demoing of the Advanced Search function in Alma. Naomi Johnston 2:25 Yeah, so give me just a second to share my screen. As we do go through. I know Jenny mentioned, she's monitoring chat. But for those who have joined us, if you do have questions as we're going, please feel free to post them in the chat and Jenny will collect them and then we'll have time for a q&a at the end. So the first thing we want to start out with everybody can see, okay, awesome. So, I know this is not a reports thing. It's advanced search in Alma. But there's a few things that you can do with the Advanced Search that are incredibly fast and easy. instead of jumping into analytics and having to find or create a whole big report, plus you can get real time data that includes things that have happened the current day. And that's not something that you can get in analytics because of all the overnight updates that they have to run. So I'm gonna show you three advanced searches related to circulation. First is if something's in a temporary location, so I use this a lot for display. When I'm taking stuff down from display. I always want to know if I've gotten everything off of the display shelf that I'm supposed to. So to do that, there's two things we need to pull up. First, you need the temporary item or temporary location indicator equals Yes, so this is there's a little checkbox that says is the item in a temporary location yes or no. So this is that yes box. And then if you want to look for a specific location, you would do temporary physical location. I'm going to do Course Reserves today because we took all our displays down because of COVID-19. But I know that we have some items that normally live in our main collection that we've pulled into course reserves for a semester or a couple of years. So this is a great way to get a list of course reserves, things or items that are on a display. And always remember to you can save searches, and you can export a spreadsheet of your advanced search. So that's one of them. The next one is notes. So real quick here, you can search for fulfillment notes or any of your internal notes. But keep in mind that these are keyword or phrase search or if it's empty, there is no give me a list of all of the internal notes. That's something you would have to do in analytics as well. I know we use internal note 1 to say if an item belongs to an instructor. So that's a word I'd find there. So here I can quickly get a list of all of the items that belong to an instructor and not to us. And the last Advanced Search I want to show real quick, is process type. And so this is if you want to look for something that is lost or everything that's Out on loan right now, this is a quick way to get at that information. If you wanted to send your student workers out double checking for all of your missing items. You could export this list and print it off and it would have the call numbers they could go hunting for it. But that is again gonna have some more limited information. And so now Erin's gonna jump in and show you some where to where to get more details on some of these process types and other reports about that. So I'll let her take over. Erin Balerud 5:50 Awesome. Thank you Naomi. Let me share my screen. Unknown Speaker 6:00 Okay, hopefully everyone can see it in here. Okay. So I'm going to start just from the beginning. So this is the home, obviously, and see. So to get to all these reports, I go into catalog. And you can see the file path here. So shared folders, community reports, consortia, MNPALS, reports workgroup final and then finally circ. So I'm going to be running first the item status report. So as you see, it says number of items in a given item level status. So this is going to be a lot of the same information that Naomi showed you. But it's just depending on what kind of data you're looking for is, you know whether you would decide to open this in advanced search or do it in analytics. So click Open. You can see process type here. You can choose multiple process types. I'm just going to do lost and paid And I'm going to say what has gone into lost and paid since January 1. And you can choose physical condition if you like. So if you're looking for, you know, items that are noted as damaged, you know, if you have the ability to replace some of those, that kind of thing. Just hit OK. Okay, so you can see here we've got basic Bib information for the item, fulfillment notes. And then this is sorted by location alphabetically by location name, and there's a count after each location. So we'll scroll down here, you can see that so you The nice thing about doing this in analytics is it is easier to customize some of those fields that you want, while also eliminating fields you might not want. But obviously, advanced search you can narrow down some criteria better You can use keywords, that kind of thing do searches. And again, the analytics data is not live. So here's our total. So we've got 24 items that are listed as being in lost and paid status from our third floor. This is less useful for us since we're just one location. But those of you who have multiple branches, might find this a little bit more useful. Fourth floor from curriculum bulletins again, so you can see there's a count by each location of how many items and then we get down to the bottom, and we have our grand total. So 49 items are currently in the lost and paid status. You can see this does not include any identifying patron info. And you can use the last items report or overdue items report if you're looking for that. And then here you can see down at the bottom, you can export this to excel as well. So this is one that I use a lot if I'm doing like cleanup or processing of items that have been in a particular status for a particular time frame like Erin Balerud 8:59 lost and Paid, lost, missing, etc. That's pretty much the long and short of the item status report. So I'm going to go back to the catalog. And we'll take a look at the overdue items report. So again, we're in the reports work group. Final folder in the circ folder. And here we go. overdue items report. Click Open. Now, you know, of course you did this. I even tested this this morning and it worked. Okay, sorry gang. Let's try it again. Naomi Johnston 9:53 The joy of analytics. Erin Balerud 9:55 Of course it works when we're recording and live, or doesn't work. Okay, here we go. So this one you can see just not have any prompts for you to enter. This just pulls everything down with a due date prior to today, again with the caveat that the data is available. So you can see it's in an ascending sort by the due date. And we have location, process type if applicable. So this is going to pull anything that is either lost or just currently on loan, but past the due date, call number of bar code title. And then there is a little bit of patron information. So we have the identifier of the patron and then the user group, if that's useful information for you. So again, we've if we scroll down, all the way to the bottom, any of these if you see some of these, that's a call number unknown. Naomi pointed this out yesterday and I hadn't even noticed it. Those are interlibrary loans. Okay, so then again, we get the grand total at the bottom 392 items are currently overdue. So this I like, particularly right now, if you want to look for things that are overdue, but not yet in a lost status, since overdue isn't a process type, there's not a great way to tell that. So I like this report for that. Particularly now, since I know I'm going to be changing a lot of due dates manually, since we're being really lenient with due dates due to COVID. And you can also if you want sort it by user group instead, so if you want to see like, you know, how many, you know, issues are we having with community borrower overdues or faculty overdues or something along those lines. And again, you can export this to excel down here at the bottom. This one's pretty self explanatory, I think. Let me double check my notes. That's about all I have for that one. And so finally, the last report. I will show everybody is fines paid or waived by transaction type. Scroll down to that one. I can find it. There we go. Open, and this one does have prompts again, you always want to do open. Obviously, when you're running a report, if there are prompts and you click Edit instead of open, you're not going to get any data. So I'm going to run this by fine fee creation date. We'll just say, we'll see what fines generated between February 1 and march 1. You can run by transaction date as well. But so if you look down here at transaction type, we've got payment, waive and null, unfortunately, I couldn't figure out a way to make this more useful, but null basically just means that these are fine balances so they haven't been paid or waived. yet. If you do, if you run this by Transaction Date, it will show you anything that was paid or waived within that timeframe, but it's not going to show you your balances if that's something you're looking for. So I'm just going to run it by creation date. And if we select None of these, it's going to pull all of them. So we'll do that. Click ok. Okay. So we can see here we've got the date that the fine was created, the type of fine and then so this is organized by fine fee transaction type. So since this first one is blank, these are remaining fines that generated within that time frame that I entered. So you can see we have the original balance of the fine the amount of the transaction in this case, obviously this has not been paid or waived. So that's showing zero. And then our remaining amount is the same as the original balance and the applicable comments here. Waiving reason description. Obviously, that's not relevant for this section, Nor is payment method. But then we have the identifier of the offending patron. So and then we again we have a count of the balances for each area. So for fine balances $106 remaining we scroll down. So this would be any fines that generated between those dates I entered that have been paid. So we have kind of the inverse here you have the original balance, the transaction amount, and then remaining balance for all these should be zero. And here you can see also if it was paid in house or online, if you take credit cards, credit cards an option there, we don't so we won't see that. total paid within that time frame is $114. And then finally, all of the waived fines that generated within that timeframe. So same setup as those paid, we've got the original balance $1 in this case, transaction amount, another dollar. And then so zero balance remaining. And then this, of course, will have all of the reasons that you put in for waiver, I know most of mine tend to be courtesy. And then the total, so $53 waived within that timeframe, and then we get the grand total of balances. So with between February 1 and march 1 $273, in fines generated, we either waived or paid $167 of that with remaining balance of $106. If you export this to excel, it will obviously help you keep track of that top, that top row there so you can kind of remember what each column actually is if it's not super clear, particularly if you have a lot of results to this one. So use cases for this. Obviously, you might want to compare any fines that you've waived or paid To the balances left at the end of a fiscal year. If you know you might be trying to make a case for going fine free, in which case it can be useful to see, you know, within a particular time frame, how much are we actually collecting versus how much are we waiving? And that's about I think that's about it for that one. So I will, unless anyone has any well we'll do questions at the end, so I will stop sharing my screen. And we'll let Naomi take it over for her reports. Naomi Johnston 16:35 Thank you very much. So where do we go? All right, can we see my screen? So the two that I'm going to talk about are kind of two different lenses of looking at similar information in analytics. If you've ever played with this before. There's different subject areas. that you can use to access information. And in the case of circulation data there, you can look for physical items and get a limited amount of circulation data related to those items. Or you can look for circulation data, but you'll only get in from here you'll only get items that have circulation history. So we have two separate reports to help meet different needs within those, that circulation data kind of question world. So the item circulation report is going to only be data on items that have some sort of fulfillment history a loan, a browse, a renewal, a recall etc. And then after that, I will jump over to the physical items report. And this has all the physical items, but it just has loans, browsers and last loan date on those physical items whether they have a loan or not. So it kind of show you that difference as we get in here. They both have prompts and they're again, slightly different. So on the item circulation report, and again, this is items that have circulation history. You can filter by loan date. And there's some easy basic ones here. You can also combine, whether it was before or after or between loan dates, you don't have to fill in both of these fields. So if I just want to know everything that had a loan date after January 1 of this year, I just type in January 1 of this year, and it will give me a report. Let's just do that of everything that loaned has a last loan date after January 1 of this year, you can also narrow it down by locations. If you have multiple Circulation Desks, you can do that. One thing I use this report for which was kind of fun, just out of curiosity was I put in different times of day as the loan time. So I did a chunk of 7:30 to 9:00 and then 9:01 to 11:30. And you can get a sense of when you see the most traffic at your Circulation desk. If you had multiple desks, you could compare between them. You can also pull based on a classification Library of Congress Classification or a Dewey number. This might be helpful if you're making weeding or purchasing decisions to understand what kinds of items are getting the most traffic. But keep in mind that this is only going to show you items that have a circulation history, the physical items report might be a little bit better for those weeding and purchasing decisions, because it'll give you all of the items in an area, regardless of whether they have any kind of circulation history or not. So let's go look at all of the loans after January 1. After we wait, so when you first look at this, it just seems like oodles of numbers and fields and it's kind of overwhelming but if you break it down into sections, it's a little easier to follow. So this whole first chunk here is your your loan data your circulation data. So this is total loans plus plus browses and then you just follow all the way through claims returned. If it was automatically renewed if you've got that job turned on, we only have that job turned on for faculty. So we almost never have anything in that column. We don't have a reading room. This is where you would see if you've been using that bulk of due date change job for your loans throughout COVID-19, which we have. Nobody has an audio book checked out at the moment that it needed to be used on. But that would show up in this column as well. So that's the beginning part is just all of the loan numbers. Then the middle part here is all of your item data, its location, title, etc. This is good. I like this section a lot. It includes the last loan date as well as the creation date. This is the item record creation date, so the date that you added this item to your collection. And it can be really helpful to play around with the creation dates and last loan dates to get a sense of how much items are circulating when they're new versus when they've been in your collection, a little longer. And then this one here, it pulled in just the total number of loans from what we like if you came from Aleph over to Alma with us. Um, this column will include that total number of loans that it had in Aleph it doesn't have any date with it, though. So it's just that number. So for example, this Eva Braun audio book, it's had one loan since January 1, and I can see that it was loaned January 8, but it's had three loans over the course of its lifetime. So subject information, if that's helpful to you, and then just the classification information is here. This report does also have the totals at the bottom, but it's kind of a headache once you get down there because you'll have next to no idea which numbers which the one I just try and always remember is this very first column here, the total loans & browses, so we've had 336 loans & browses since January 1 of this year. So this is the item circulation report. Again, it's just items that have circulation history. So as you're scrolling through here, you're gonna see all one or more in that first column, nothing will have a zero for loans. So let's go Sorry, I won't make you seasick scrolling. The physical items report will give you information on all of the physical items in a particular section or, and I'll show you the prompts. So you can look at all right, everything that we got before x date, or everything that was most recently loaned in these dates. Um, you can get rid of this and it will ignore it. You can also search by particular locations. So let's go look at I'm going to pick our main collection because that's our big one. Let's Say I want to know information on everything in F. I know we have stuff there. And I'm interested in history, if you were making this is again, probably more useful for making weeding or purchasing decisions. So this is going to show me all of the physical items in my main books collection with the classification code of F. And I did not supply any dates. So this is just going to give me everything that exists there. And this is going to be whether it has circulation data or not. So instead of starting with the circ data, this one starts with the item information just because that's more of the lens that we're looking through, and then you'll find that circulation data in the middle here. So you'll notice here like the Voyager has no loans no browses, no last loan date. So you can kind of see the difference here that this report will include items with no info, no loan history, as well as items that have loan history. It can also be helpful to keep your eye out on the last loan date compared to the creation date. Especially if you're short on space and you need to find yourself weeding, you can use this report to locate items that were purchased so many years ago and have never loaned or have had really low numbers of loans. And you can narrow that search down to a very specific call number range. If you are pretty sure that you've got that kind of a range in mind that you know, you want to shrink. And then just all the classification data. This one has the normalized call number has a lot of those Circ ones don't though. So if you export this one, it'll be on there. And then this one also has a total at the bottom. It will be the total number of loans and browses across all of these items across whatever time period you've put in. So in our entire collection of what did I put in F was the classification code. We have 235 loans & browses and if I exported this I could more easily see the number of items and then get a feel for how much that section is being used. So that is the physical items report. And that is the last report that we had planned to share with you today. So I'm stopping my screen sharing and I wanted to give Jenny a chance to let us know if there's any questions we needed to answer or further topics to cover. And if you have questions at this point, feel free to unmute or post them in the chat. Jennifer Lund 25:28 So so far, we just had one question about whether or not people have run the bulk change due date job and what their success has been. Some people have communicated through chat to answer that question. So that's all we've had so far. So I guess I'm gonna open it up. Does anyone want to comment on the bulk change due date job? And how they've used it and how helpful it's been especially during this time and maybe any tips or tricks. It's not really necessarily a reports thing, but we're all circ people so it all fits I guess. Naomi Johnston 26:16 We've been using that job I found it incredibly helpful. Erin Balerud 26:24 I ran it once and it worked for all my loans, but it didn't I must have done something wrong because it didn't exclude the interlibrary loans like I was trying to make it exclude them. So poor Wendy had to do some some cleanup after I was done. So I'll probably be reaching out to Pals. Before I do that again. Jennifer Lund 26:45 At CSS we had an issue so I just you know, with everything happening so quick, I just want to quickly push out the due dates as quick as possible. And I also was not as careful when I ran it and I was kind of thinking it would send something like the borrowing activity letter with Everything on one email for communication like saying these are the items were changed, but it sends that change due date letter for each individual item. So faculty that had over 100 items owed got that change due date letter for each and every single item. It was, yeah. So, deactivate that letter before using, I would just have the borrowing activity letter. That's all I would use. Naomi Johnston 27:28 One thing I did want to say, um, I know there are a lot more circ reports in that folder that we didn't go through today. Some of that is just for time, we didn't want to overwhelm everybody with a bajillion reports in one day. And part of that is also because we didn't want to modify the reports to remove identifying information just for today. So some of those reports that only have the the borrower's ID there are similar reports that have more information in them and we encourage you to play around with With those reports as much as you want, if you want to change any of the actual, like the prompts and the things that go into the report, please feel free to copy them don't change the originals, and Jill is happy to help anybody who needs help getting those copied and moved to their own folders as well. And oh, were we gonna, I will post the link to that survey that Jenny mentioned at the beginning. So if you do use any of the reports, and you have feedback, there's a survey you can fill out and I'll go grab that link and if you have any more questions, feel free to shout them out. Jennifer Lund 28:41 So there was one other question about what browse means on the report. So I responded on in chat is browse uses just when an item is not actually checked out by a patron it's scanned for in house use so it's handy for like reference items, things that don't circulate periodicals. You know, if you you know, a lot of library some libraries don't track browse, use or don't scan browse, you say just put them right back on the shelf. But, you know, that can be a really helpful stat, especially, you know, for reference questions and items that don't leave the library. And as circulation numbers decline, I think those browse stats are really helpful to track so anytime you find a book lying around on a table or carrol, scan it Erin Balerud 29:27 It also tracks the last person to scan it in which I have a lot of student workers so a lot of things, you know, get maybe a little bit misshelved. So it is nice to be able to track something missing down and say, Hey, you know, you scanned this in two weeks ago. Do you remember where you might have shelled that? Jennifer Lund 29:45 Nice, I did not know that. Thanks for sharing. Naomi Johnston 29:52 We rely on it. Well, not me but our head librarian does rely a lot on the in house use for when he's making weeding decisions. Because we don't always have our stuff circulating, if someone's been reading it, we have couches and tables in the library. So students who just come and read there, and we want to know what they're taking advantage of where that in house use comes from is if you instead of returning the item in Alma, you can scan in the item and record an in house use. And that is, that's where that data comes from. Jennifer Lund 30:35 I'm not seeing any more questions. Does anyone have any other questions? I know Alma analytics can be intimidating the group when we started this, it was a little a little overwhelming at first when you you know, first go into it, it's Alma analytics. It's not an Alma product, it's provided by Oracle. So it has a different look & feel to it, then Alma does, it takes some getting used to sometimes, you know, it doesn't work the way you expect it to. Sometimes I have to log out and log back in, when I'm having issues with it. There's so many folders, there's tons of reports and Alma out of the box reports, then you have all the community reports from all the institutions that are on Alma and you could just get lost in there playing with those and I recommend, you know, trying things out. And definitely visiting the Knowledge Center for best practices. And we've sent some communication out with a survey, email, invites, there was some links to video training and then also best practices for using Alma analytics. So just keep that in mind. One thing with editing reports, you know, you want to download it or not, don't you want to save it to your own folder before you make changes so. So take a look at some of that information as well. Naomi Johnston 32:07 Do people generally feel comfortable with that process of saving a copy to your own folder? I think there's probably documentation out there. But do we need to walk through that? Jennifer Lund 32:20 It might be helpful. I'm guessing a lot of people are jumping in here. Having not had an opportunity to play in Alma analytics yet. So thank you for offering. Naomi Johnston 32:31 Yeah, let me hop back into my screen sharing or there was another thing in there. Sorry, I just saw a comment come through. Where'd it go? Um, Jennifer Lund 32:45 okay, if you could walk through how to open a report again, that would be helpful. So yeah, sweet. That that all fits with. You'll have to open one. Yeah. So Naomi Johnston 32:58 I assume everybody knows that they're under analytics, but it's analytics and then design analytics. There's also Primo analytics, which our group did not dive into at all. But ex libris just did a webinar on that, that yesterday, recently, so you can always look that up. But in design analytics, the catalog is the easiest way to go hunt for the reports. And, and they are super buried. So at a high level, you have your own personal folders, which are unique to you as a user, not anybody else in your institution. So that's a great place to save things that you're just playing around with. If you need to share it with anybody, you'll want to choose shared folders. And then within the shared folders, there's a whole bunch of choices. So I work at DCTC, this is where I can put things that I want to share with other colleagues at my college. They'll be able to access these from their own login as well. To find the reports that we've been referencing today though, those are under community. And then under community there's I don't know why they did this. There's community and then reports, there's only one choice. And then the first thing you'll see here is consortia. So these are for the MnPALS Consortium. That's why they're all buried under Consortium. And then you just scroll all the way down until you get to MnPALS right under Madrid. And then here, let me move this out so you can see more, so we're working on some cleanup. Still, there are two different reports Working Group folders. This is the one that we were experimenting with and we are moving stuff out of there. Everything that you're going to want to find is in the reports work group final. And then there's folders for each of the subject areas. So the reports that we talked about today were all circ as we go throughout the week, and there are all the other presentations. Those will be in our other subject areas. So then you just click on expand and you can see all of the circ reports that have been created. And then if you wanted to copy something to your own, let's say, I don't know, let's say I really need to look up missing items and I want that report. There is up here, this little two pages icon, that means copy right next to the x here. And by the way, don't worry about accidentally deleting something, it'll come back. There's a messy process for deleting reports. Don't please don't try to delete anything, but if you do accidentally delete it, maybe just put in a ticket and let Jill know but it should come back. So you'll want to copy it and then the paste icon will light up and you'll go up into go find your own folders, you can create your own sub folders. Mine are being nice and sleepy this morning. But we should be able to paste it and then eventually it'll wake up and way at the bottom. Is that circ missing items one, it'll resort alphabetically as you go in and out of your folders. But when you first paste something, it shows up right at the bottom. So now I can go open that report and see my missing items. Are there any questions about that? Did I go too fast? Jennifer Lund 36:27 I'm not seeing anything in chat. I did paste the path in there. Um, and that's also I mean, if you just search your emails in MnPALS-Discuss, the email is invitation to test MnPALS online reports, but I will resend that this week as well. And as Naomi mentioned, that there was like an ELUNA knowledge days like last week, and I think it's still going on now where they're doing theirs. They have lots of training And all of them are all the sessions are recorded. I'll find the link and post that in chat too. But um, there's several on analytics, I think and there's some coming up on digitization and all kinds of good stuff to maybe check out if you have time. Naomi Johnston 37:18 Absolutely. Are there any other questions? Or Jill, is there anything you wanted to add as we wrap up? Thank you Etta. Jill Holman 37:50 Um, we could clarify about where the reports are, because we're cleaning that up and so it will be a level higher it will be in the MnPALS folder in fulfillment for these reports once we get it all cleaned up, Naomi Johnston 38:03 Oh, that's right there. Okay, so community reports, consortia. I forgot about that second level of cleanup. So they are going to be getting out of the reports work group one and into subject areas. Thank you, Jill. So they will end up in here under fulfillment, and they will be identified as reports work group ones, that somewhere you'll find an RWG in the name of it. And perhaps, Jenny, when you resend that email, do you mind correcting the path for finding them and including Oh, Jennifer Lund 38:44 yeah, sorry. Good catch. Thank you. I will do that. Naomi Johnston 38:47 Thank you. We had a lot of trouble with multiple folders and reports in multiple places. It's a wild time in analytics. Jill Holman 38:58 Yes, it does get messy. Naomi Johnston 39:03 Alright, if there isn't anything else, then it sounds like we are about ready to wrap up and you can have 20 minutes of your afternoon back that was scheduled. So, thank you all so very much for coming. We appreciate your time. If you do end up having any further questions, you are welcome to contact us or put in a ticket. Jill answers all of your analytics tickets and we'll be happy to help you as well. And we hope you all have a great day. Erin Balerud 39:37 Thanks for showing up everybody. We appreciate it. Transcribed by https://otter.ai