Skip to Main Content

Alma Acquisitions Resource Guide

This guide covers all aspects of the Acquisitions process, which includes setting up funds, ordering, receiving physical items, activating e-resources, and invoicing. This guide also covers Serials patterns and arrival/check-in.

Order Maintenance Tasks with POL Details Page

Order Maintenance Tasks on the POL Details Page

There are several order maintenance tasks that are managed from the PO Line Details screen. To get to that screen, find your order and click on Edit. Note that these options only appear after the order has been sent; if it hasn't been sent yet - if it's waiting for review, for instance - you can just edit the original order.

 

Changing Vendors

There are two ways to change the vendor for an order using the buttons along the top:

  • Replace (only) Vendor will change the vendor and nothing else, and will not send a new order to the new vendor. Use this if there’s no reason to send another order, and the old order is still valid. To use this option, a one-time order must be in a status of Sent or Waiting for Invoice; continuous orders must be Sent, Waiting for Renewal, or Waiting for Manual Renewal.
  • Change Vendor will change the vendor and send a new order to that new vendor. This new POL will be packaged into a new purchase order and deleted from the original PO. If that POL was the only order on that PO, the entire PO will be deleted. To use this option, a one-time order can only be in a status of Sent (nothing yet received or activated); continuous orders can be Sent, Waiting for Renewal, or Waiting for Manual Renewal.

 

Changing a POL’s Bibliographic Reference

The bibliographic reference is the brief bib description in the POL, as we saw earlier. Changing the bib reference does not mean changing the bib record a POL is linked to, or the holdings or items. Changing the bib reference is useful when an order was made on a provisional or stub bib record, but there is now better information available on the bib record that can be added to the POL description.

This feature is relevant for title-based PO lines, and cannot be performed on cancelled PO lines.

If you click on Change Bib Reference – either in the row action list or on the POL details screen – Alma will perform a repository search to find the correct updated bib information. There may be only one result, in which case click on it, or there may be more than one, in which case find the one you want and click on that. Alma will update the information accordingly in the POL bib description.

 

Relinking a POL to a Different Bibliographic Record

You can also Relink a POL to a different bib record, which moves the corresponding items and holdings to that new bib record. You might do this if your item matched an existing bib record better than the one imported for the order, or if the POL is linked to a bib record for single volume that’s actually part of a multivolume work with a separate bib record.

Relinking works in the same way as changing the bib reference: click on Relink, perform the search to find the bib record you want to link the order (and its holdings and items) to, and click on that result in the list. In addition, when you relink the bib record, the bib reference will automatically update to the new information as well.

The Relink option is only available for PO lines with the following statues:

  • One-time orders must be Sent, Waiting for Invoice, In Review, Deferred, Ready, Auto Packaging, Manual Packaging, or Closed
  • Continuous orders must be Waiting for Renewal, Waiting for Manual Renewal, In Review, Deferred, Ready, Auto Packaging, or Manual Packaging.