Alma Resource Sharing Guide

If you are participating in out of state resource sharing through Alma or are considering joining the group there are a few configurations to enhance the findability of items that are available out of state.

When joining out of state resource sharing, unless otherwise requested FLVC will leave institutional discovery settings unchanged. Some institutions limit UBorrow requestability of items not held in the Florida 40 and direct request to external systems. With this configuration the only Alma resource sharing requests that will be directed to the out of state partners will be items held and requestable in Florida 40 but are currently unavailable. 

Institutional discovery settings are varied due to institutional preferences so the FLVC team can assess current settings and update them as desired. Please submitt a help ticket if you wish to explore your options. We would be happy to meet with you to discuss.

When users search the Primo VE using “Expand My Results” book records that are returned can be made requestable even if they are not available within the Florida 40. The FLVC team can assist you with examining your current Primo VE configuration to ensure book records in Primo are requestable.

• Positive
  • When using expanded search results, request options are increased.
• Negative:
  • A CDI record may not be held in the Florida 40 or our out of state partner collections. Requests for these items would result in an unfilled request.

A blank resource sharing form can be enabled for an institution. The settings on this form are shared between all request forms, including UBorrow, this limits customization options. 

•  Positives: 
  • Users can request any item.
•  Negatives
  • Users can provide poor citation information, increasing the need for staff mediation. Mediation can be configured based on metadata submitted.
  • Increased automatic rejections may frustrate users. 
  • The request form option does not validate the information provided or resource sharing restrictions.
     

The option exists to enable a real time availability check that displays on request forms. Some institutions currently have this functionality enabled. This functionality does not work for institutions who have Rapid integrated into Alma or have a lender of last resort configured such as Worldshare or Illiad. This availability checker will function for out of state resource sharing partners. 

Staff can create manual requests for resource sharing items that are not held in the Florida 40 via Alma. This process starts in the same way as creating a manual Uborrow request. Please verify the item is not requestable within the Uborrow before following this procedure. 

1. Access the Borrowing Request Screen from Fulfillment > Resource Sharing > Borrowing Requests.
    
2. Click on Create Request -> Manually -> Book
    
3. Fill out the Resource information for the requested item. Matches for out of state resource sharing are based off of Title, Author, ISBN/ISSN, and LCCN. Fill out as many of these fields as possible for the best match.
4. Fill out the Requester, Owner, Requested Format and Requested Pickup locations in the Request Attributes. 
5. Select the Rotas button in the the Request Attributes area.
6. Chose Out of State Resource Sharing and press select.
7. Select Locate at the top of the Resource Sharing Borrowing Request form.
8. The request should now be active and will be processed if it is available at the out of state partners.