The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up Alma

Is your Alma environment a cluttered attic of outdated records, lingering purchase orders, and expired user accounts? At CUNY, large-scale cleanup is essential for improving discovery, ensuring reliable reporting, and keeping daily workflows running smoothly across multiple Institution Zones and a shared Network Zone. This session shares the central office's practical approaches to identifying and cleaning up bibliographic, holdings, and item records; purchase order lines; electronic portfolios; patron requests; calendars; and user accounts. Drawing on real cleanup projects, we'll explain how we used Alma's advanced searches, jobs, normalization rules, Analytics reports, APIs, and external tools like Excel and MarcEdit to find problems, analyze their impact, and fix them at scale. We'll also highlight common pitfalls and offer guidance for maintaining a cleaner Alma environment over time.