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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.

Binding

Binding

To combine the item records for materials that are being bound together:

  1. Find the list of items that you’re going to bind together. How you do this depends on whether your materials are older or newer, and your personal preference.
    • Search for the Title record
    • If they've been just received, go to the Receive New Materials list
    • Search for any one Item record that’s going to be bound, then skip to step 3
  2. From any of these starting points, go to the Title record for the materials being bound
    • If there is only one holdings record for that title, click on View all items and proceed with the next step.
    • If there are multiple holdings, click on Holdings and then choose View Items for the appropriate holdings record. This allows the next step to happen correctly.
  3. From the list of items, choose any item – it doesn’t matter which one – and click on Edit item.
  4. From the Physical Item Editor (and this is actually very important) click on View all items.
    • Only when you start at the editor will you see the option to bind items (and a few other neat things). If you go straight from the bib record to that list of items, you won’t see this. First you have to tell Alma that you’re editing things, and then it presents you with more editing options.
  5. Now, click the ticky boxes next to all of the items you are going to bind together.
  6. Click on Bind
  7. Alma will step you through the process from here, including creating a Work Order for the binding process.
  8. Once you confirm the Work Order, Alma will automatically delete all of the individual item records and create a new item record for the bound item.
  9. On the Physical Item Editor for that new bound item record, update the barcode, the enumeration and chronology, and any other fields that need changing.
  10. Click Save
  11. You’ll return to the items list. Your new item will have a status of Item not in place, because it’s in the work order process for binding. Once the materials are bound, and ready to be shelved, that work order will need to be marked as done by scanning in the item.
  12. If you want to edit the holdings record in the Metadata Editor to reflect the new bound volume, click View all holdings, find the holdings record, and click Edit in the row action list. Edit the record and save.