Michelle Eichelberger: Alright! Why don't we go ahead and get started? Thank you all for joining me today. Let me just get the slide show going.
Michelle Eichelberger: Great welcome to Intro to Alma analytics. I'm Michelle Eichelberger. I'm the discovery and E resources program manager at Suny library services, and we're going to talk about the basics of Alma analytics today.
Michelle Eichelberger: So here's what we're gonna go over. I've got about 16 slides. We're gonna look at roles and access and some tips and tricks for dealing with your account. Once you're within all my analytics, we'll look at the navigation how to use the catalog to get to canned reports and some of the tools that you can use will
Michelle Eichelberger: very, basically look at how you would start creating your own analysis from scratch. And we'll also look at objects, objects and sharing. We're not going to take a deep dive into creating the reports. This is part of a series. We'll talk about that in a minute. And other people are going to talk more specifically about subject areas like fulfillment or cataloging, or things like that.
Michelle Eichelberger: So why do you care. Why should we care about analytics now that we're 5 years in after the migration things are starting to calm down a little bit, you know. I think most people are starting to feel more confident about using Alma for basic things. And now is time to start learning some new things or start practicing things that you learned a couple of years ago and maybe haven't had time to delve into
Michelle Eichelberger: analytics is really great because it can inform important decisions like collection development. Or you know what you're doing with your space, you can figure out, are, you know, are things in this particular area of the library getting used a lot. Are they not getting used at all? You can look at eresources
Michelle Eichelberger: for making decisions about
Michelle Eichelberger: deciding to keep them or not. Things like that that can determine how busy your circulation desk is when it's most busy, all of those things. So it's a really great tool.
Michelle Eichelberger: Also the reports that you generate can be shared with administration, and they can really help you make your case if you need more people, or need to make some other changes in the library.
Michelle Eichelberger: So, as I mentioned, we have 6 more sessions in this series, and I put a link here in the slides. We will be sharing the slides to the other sessions, and those will be on more specific areas within analytics.
Michelle Eichelberger: This training isn't meant to replace the ex levers training. They do an amazing job. They have a becoming an expert series for Alma analytics. They've run it a couple of years. There's still recordings from the previous years, but it is starting up again. So there's a link to register for those sessions.
Michelle Eichelberger: They're fantastic.
Michelle Eichelberger: We also have a couple of guides about analytics. We have kind of a general training guide. We've got a few faqs. I am going to duplicate a little bit some of the information in there. So I you know I'm I don't want to, just word for word, copy everything that's out there, but just know that those are there. If you need a little more information.
Michelle Eichelberger: I would say that analytics is a bit overwhelming when you 1st start playing with it, and the only way to get better at it is to play around in there. It's really hard to break anything. So if you go out there, just start practicing trial and error, it can be incredibly frustrating. I can tell you. But it's it. Once you get more comfortable with it, it can lead to all kinds of benefits.
Michelle Eichelberger: Okay.
Michelle Eichelberger: the key points that you need to keep in mind about Alma. Analytics is that it's built on Oracle's business, intelligent platform. So this is partly why it's so complicated, so complex. I mean, this is a system that's been around for a long time. It's got all kinds of bells and whistles, and that does make it a pretty steep learning curve when you're trying to get in there. And just you know, it's like, I just want to report to do this one thing. But you do have to get comfortable with this environment.
Michelle Eichelberger: It keeps a record of everything pretty much that you do. So you know all of your cataloging all of your circulation. I know that in Olive, you know, if you deleted a bib record that would remove that information from any previous circulations, you know, if somebody had fines it would. You wouldn't be able to tell what the fines are for. Almost not like that. It keeps all of that information. It's really great. So
Michelle Eichelberger: because of that, you can do things like delete bib records. If you don't need them anymore, you can always go to analytics and see if you used to have it, what happened to it? There's a life cycle function that tells you, okay, these are the dates. It was in the repository which is meaning that you had it in Alma. Here's when it was deleted or withdrawn. All of that stuff is tracked for you. It's really amazing.
Michelle Eichelberger: The data is always a day behind, and sometimes it's more behind for their various subject areas. Those are the categories, for, you know, fulfillment or items or things like that
Michelle Eichelberger: for titles in particular. I don't think that's updated daily. I think it's I don't know the details, and that's something that you could learn from the becoming an expert series. But just bear in mind that the data is not of the second.
Michelle Eichelberger: So if you see some weird stuff in there that could be partly. Why.
Michelle Eichelberger: also on the analytics is not always the best way to find information, sometimes an indication rule which is something that you can run to pull out different records by using mark fields, or really, an advanced search is quite powerful in Alma, and that might be a better way to pull the data that you need. So you know, the 1st step to figuring out which
Michelle Eichelberger: kind of tool you need to use is to just start playing with all of them, and then you can see, you know this will work better for finding bib records with no holdings, or this will work better for pulling out historical information which would be in it in all my analytics.
Michelle Eichelberger: Alright. So here's a list of the roles that you would need to create analytics. I'm not gonna read this all out to you. You can take a look at it later. It's also in our guides that I mentioned earlier. But basically, if you want all of the power to do anything in analytics, you would need an analytics administrator role.
Michelle Eichelberger: you could also add some of these other roles. I would just kind of play around with it. See what you need to do. I did put a link to the documentation on the roles. You can get really granular, you know, if you're at a big campus and you have a lot of staff, and you don't want them all in there playing around, you know, possibly getting into student data or other things. You can really fine tune how people can use all my analytics.
Michelle Eichelberger: So the way you get into analytics is through the left hand panel.
Michelle Eichelberger: and we are going to do a demo. I forgot to mention that we're going to go through slides, and we're going to do a demo. So you just go click on the left where it says analytics and then click on access analytics
Michelle Eichelberger: regularly. When I go in I get a login screen. So if this happens to you don't panic.
Michelle Eichelberger: you probably just have to. You just X out of the pop up screen log out of Alma log back in, and then it should work. I don't know why this happens, but if you see it, don't worry about it. It's it happens pretty regularly.
Michelle Eichelberger: So once you get in
Michelle Eichelberger: up in the top right there's this little you know that your account icon here up in the top right, and once you go in there, there's quite a bit you can do in there. I'm not going to cover everything that you can do but a couple of the key tips and tricks that we've learned.
Michelle Eichelberger: If you're in analytics and you're doing a lot of editing, you may notice that when you go to edit a report that you've already worked on, it opens to the results page, which is kind of irritating, because usually you want to change something that's in the criteria rather than looking at the results and going back to the criteria tab, you can actually change how that works. So if you go in to your account, click on preferences and then down here in the analytics and
Michelle Eichelberger: analysis editor, and then change the dropdown to start on criteria tab when editing analysis that will switch that for you. Another thing you can do is you can change your default. Starting page. There are, and we'll I'll show you once we get out there. But if you change that to home instead of default, that'll
Michelle Eichelberger: pull you into things that you've worked on recently. It's an easier way to get back to things that you've been working on. So that is something else I would recommend, but feel free to to look into all of these different parts of the account. There may be other things that you find useful that you might want to change. And what's nice is, it'll only change it for your personal account. It's not going to change it, for anybody else's. So feel free to play around with all of the options in there.
Michelle Eichelberger: Once you get in, you know. So here's the landing page. I mentioned that you can change the default to home if you don't change it to home. This is just going to be blank if it's blank. Don't worry. That's expected. That's kind of what the default is. But if you click on home. Here's where it shows you reports that you've worked on recently. You know, if you have any particular dashboards that you've set up. Those would be showing as well.
Michelle Eichelberger: The most important things I find out of the navigation on the top are this home tab. The catalog is where you're going to find all of the reports that either you've created or the community has created or ex libers has created. You can also set favorites. The other thing that I use. Well, you have to use it all the time is the create. That's how you create a report from scratch or a dashboard, or whatever it is that you're working on.
Michelle Eichelberger: Alright, let's go
Michelle Eichelberger: to the next page. So I mentioned the catalog.
Michelle Eichelberger: You will see that it's a tree structure
Michelle Eichelberger: which is handy, I think, and there are various folders here. So the my folders area. Those are things that only you can see. This is a great place to put reports that you're kind of in progress on. You maybe aren't ready to share them yet with anybody on your team. You know. That's a great place to sort of do draft kinds of things.
Michelle Eichelberger: But the shared folders are really powerful and really helpful.
Michelle Eichelberger: The 1st one is Alma, and those are reports that ex levers has created in various subject areas.
Michelle Eichelberger: And when I say subject areas again, that's the sort of the high level topics fulfillment cataloging those kinds of things, and they're really great. And what's nice is, if you use any of these reports, if you open them right from the shared folder. It's going to show your data, which is very cool, I think, but you can also copy those reports to your own folder and make edits. You can do all kinds of things with them.
Michelle Eichelberger: Please don't ever change anything in the shared folders. Don't edit what's out there, because those are there for everybody to use, and unfortunately there's no way to prevent people from editing them. So that is something that I would highly highly recommend that you don't edit things, just copy them, paste them into your own area, and then you can work on them locally.
Michelle Eichelberger: So again, that 1st folder is for Alma. These are for ex libers reports. The second folder is
Michelle Eichelberger: pretty amazing that this is a possibility with this, with ex libraries that they allow the community to share reports out like this. There's all kinds of stuff in there. You could spend weeks just exploring what's out in the community.
Michelle Eichelberger: You can have institution folders out there. If if your particular institution wants to share something with the entire community, you'll find consortia folders. Suny does have a folder and a lot of the time when we want to share things with people, you know, like for ipads or those kinds of reports that we think might be useful for everyone. We put them out there, and I will show you that more
Michelle Eichelberger: in detail when we go out and do the live demo. And again, you know, like anything else. Please don't change anything or add anything to the Suny community without checking with us first, st you know, if you have a report that you think would be useful for people. Maybe we could put it there, or maybe we could set up an institution folder for you.
Michelle Eichelberger: Thanks to Fredonia for letting them for letting me use them as my demo site for this presentation. You'll see that they also have a Ri Alto folder. That's because they get Rialto. If you don't get Rialto, you're not going to see that. So if you don't see it, don't worry about it.
Michelle Eichelberger: And then the last folder that you'll see is a shared campus folder, and this is really a helpful area where you can put reports that you want to share out with your colleagues. You can use it for all kinds of things, and sometimes we'll Sls will put folders in there for you that we think you might want to use rather than having to go and find them out in the community. So that is a description of the folders.
Michelle Eichelberger: So, as I mentioned some things to think about with using the catalog of the the. My folder is the best place to kind of fool around and practice. And like, I said, it's really hard to break anything in analytics. If you make a mistake, you can always start from scratch, or you can edit what you did it. It takes so much trial and error to make a good report honestly, because
Michelle Eichelberger: figuring out what fields to use, how to filter them. It just takes time. So
Michelle Eichelberger: practice all you want. You're not going to hurt anything if you put reports out there. So also in the my folders and your institution folder. It's really easy to add
Michelle Eichelberger: structure, you know, if you want to make a subfolder, you can delete reports if you make a mistake with something.
Michelle Eichelberger: If for some reason you did at 1 point have an institution folder out in the community. That is a lot harder to edit things in terms of, you know. Oh, I created this report. And now I realized I don't want it, or I pasted something in the wrong spot. That is a much bigger pain to deal with in terms of getting rid of it.
Michelle Eichelberger: They only update that area once a week.
Michelle Eichelberger: And so you have to do a special thing to get things deleted. It's hard to rename things. So again.
Michelle Eichelberger: my recommendation would be to focus locally on your my folders and institution folder, because
Michelle Eichelberger: you can. Really, you have a lot more power there
Michelle Eichelberger: to make any changes. And once you have a working report in your personal folder, you could copy it to the institution folder, and then you can set up a widget or a you know, shared reports by email. We will just show how to do that.
Michelle Eichelberger: And so that's a good place for those things.
Michelle Eichelberger: So then the I mentioned the almond community folders
Michelle Eichelberger: anything that you find out there. If you open it right from there, it will use your local data, which again, is really cool. I mean to to see somebody else has set up this thing and you open it and it. And it looks at your stuff locally, not their stuff.
Michelle Eichelberger: And again, don't, please don't edit them. Sorry to sound like a broken record on that.
Michelle Eichelberger: and then to edit it, you would do copy the report, paste it into your folder. You can also copy dashboards, but you don't want to use the regular copy and paste because it.
Michelle Eichelberger: There's a long story about how this breaks things, but it. It breaks all the data connections, and it can spawn duplicate copies of things. But there is a way you can do it. You can choose to archive those dashboards and then on archive them. So I put a link to the method
Michelle Eichelberger: for how to do that. There's a long description of how that works.
Michelle Eichelberger: I'm gonna just take a pause and see if there's any chat.
Michelle Eichelberger: Great. Oh, thanks, Marcy, for adding that
Michelle Eichelberger: alright, let's keep going. So I mentioned that there's some tools that are really handy when you get out there.
Michelle Eichelberger: The I mentioned, you can add folders underneath your personal area, or even in your institution. And the place that you go to do that is this little top left.
Michelle Eichelberger: Drop down any arrow here, and you would just click on folder to add a new folder.
Michelle Eichelberger: The other tool that I was late to learn about. But now use all the time is the search tool. So in that catalog you would pick the folder that you want to search and then click on search, and then you can search by name, which is great, because sometimes, if you get a ton of reports, it can be hard to sift through them to find the exact one that you're looking for. So the search does work pretty well, and will bring you to whatever it is you are looking for
Michelle Eichelberger: alright, so to create an analysis. This is, you know.
Michelle Eichelberger: what I would do mostly is if you have an idea for something that you want to figure out. You know, circulation for a certain call number range over a certain time period. There's probably somebody else who has created that report already.
Michelle Eichelberger: and
Michelle Eichelberger: there also may be something in the Alma
Michelle Eichelberger: folder that Xleber set up, because that would be a pretty standard thing people would want to know. So before creating your own analysis. I would do some digging around just to see if that's already created, because that could save you a lot of time rather than having to create something from scratch. But there are also times when you do want to create something from scratch. And the way to do that is to click on, create. And then a basic report they call an analysis.
Michelle Eichelberger: So you'd click on create analysis. And then I keep talking about these subject areas. This is a list of the subject areas.
Michelle Eichelberger: And then so you would pick what you want to work in. That is probably one of the hardest parts about this, because you don't really know off the top of your head what data is captured, in what area?
Michelle Eichelberger: But that does take a lot of trial and error.
Michelle Eichelberger: But you would pick the one you wanted to play around in, and then it opens up the place where you actually do the selection of the fields.
Michelle Eichelberger: and these are all of the different kinds of data that would be able to be measured or pulled in. And again, we'll do a little playing around with this. We're not going to like, spend half an hour on this, but I'll show you kind of basically how you would set it up. But you get this left hand column with your different options, and then you just you kind of click on the things and drag them over to the selected columns area.
Michelle Eichelberger: and you can see. Here's you start with the criteria because you have to tell it what you're looking for, and then you look at the results to see if it's working the way that you want it to work. And
Michelle Eichelberger: so much trial and error, you go and results. And it says, no data found. And you know, there's data found out there. So it is. You do have to do a lot of playing around with this. So if you feel frustrated with this. You are not alone, and there's nothing wrong with you. It just is a complicated system to learn.
Michelle Eichelberger: So.
Michelle Eichelberger: as I mentioned, there's a steep learning curve the system is complicated, and it's only as good as the data you've tracked, you know. So if you're looking for something that maybe you haven't
Michelle Eichelberger: your. You know your staff hasn't done consistently like there's a method for tracking withdrawals. Maybe that hasn't been done consistently. If that data isn't in there, you're not going to be able to pull it out. The same thing with usage for databases, you know. If you don't have all your sushi set up, then you're not going to find it in analytics. So it can only make
Michelle Eichelberger: reports based on what you've actually got in your system.
Michelle Eichelberger: The subject areas are challenging because you're not sure what's included in each area. It's also not always structured. How you'd expect it to be a lot of times. It's like, well, I want to see everything that's in this particular mark Field. But all my analytics doesn't use Mark Field. So you can't say, Pull out all the 2 45 s. For this date range, etc.
Michelle Eichelberger: So that's a challenge. The terminology is sometimes vague and unclear. Also.
Michelle Eichelberger: if you know, if you're pulling some data and then you want to connect it with, you know, maybe the last loan, date or other usage stats that might be in a different subject area, and there is a way to combine those, but you have to have a matching field.
Michelle Eichelberger: So it that part can be complicated as well. And then, as I mentioned. You know the date is always a day out of date, and some of them are longer out of date than others, and it's sometimes hard to tell
Michelle Eichelberger: how out of date they might be. I think it's mainly the title subject area that isn't updated daily, because I think it's just such a big thing it it takes too much power to update it. But
Michelle Eichelberger: I could be wrong about why that is. But I do know that that is an issue.
Michelle Eichelberger: So the last thing we're going to talk about is, you know, once you've created a report. Well, what do you do with it? Then you know, how do you create a widget? How do you share it with other people? How do you get easy access to it? And the way you do that is through analytics, objects which are super handy and fairly intuitive. I think
Michelle Eichelberger: so. It's that same area on the left in Alma.
Michelle Eichelberger: where you click on analytics. But instead of going to access analytics, you go to the analytics object list.
Michelle Eichelberger: And again, the the reason for this is to make it easier to get back to the reports that you created. So we'll do a demo and show you how to use this.
Michelle Eichelberger: And then, so this is what it looks like inside of that area. This is this sort of layout with the list of results. And you click on one and it shows up in a side panel
Michelle Eichelberger: online is moving to this for a lot of things. You will be
Michelle Eichelberger: seeing this sort of layout coming for the title search. I think it's already being applied in some of the other areas. So just get used to the way this looks, because this is sort of where they're going with Hama in general.
Michelle Eichelberger: But basically the name of the report is on the left, and if you click on it you get a lot of details over here to add a new one. You can click on the 3 dots and add a new analytics object. Primo analytics are separate from Alma. So we will talk about that later in this series. But basically you can add from different areas.
Michelle Eichelberger: Then, once you've got it in here on the right hand side, if you scroll down, there's a way to add it as a widget. You can set up people to email it to and there are other things you can do. And I put a link to the training guide that's got more in depth, screenshots and information about that. And we are going to go out and look at it live
Michelle Eichelberger: oops.
Michelle Eichelberger: Okay? So I'm going to stop sharing.
Michelle Eichelberger: And I'm going to just see how we're doing any questions so far.
Michelle Eichelberger: Okay, cool. Well, let's go take a look and feel free to chime in while I'm presenting. It's hard to see the chat. So you know, once we're out looking around. If you have a question feel free to just hop on and let me know I would be happy to answer anything. So I'm going to
Michelle Eichelberger: share again.
Michelle Eichelberger: So we're gonna go to chrome.
Michelle Eichelberger: Okay? Cool and thanks again, too, Fredonia, I really appreciate you letting me use you as a guinea pig for this session.
Michelle Eichelberger: So basically, as I mentioned, all the analytic stuff is over here. I'm gonna shrink my screen a little bit.
Michelle Eichelberger: Sometimes it, you know, it gets stuck underneath different
Michelle Eichelberger: options on the left. So we're going to go to analytics. And we're going to go to access analytics.
Michelle Eichelberger: This is looking promising. Okay, a lot of the time. I do just get this like login box in the middle. So if you see that just X out of it, go back to Alma, log out, log back in, and that should fix your problem.
Michelle Eichelberger: So I mentioned, you know you get this kind of blank screen. If you haven't changed your settings.
Michelle Eichelberger: just move that out of the way, and if I wanted to change that so that it would go to home, I'd go to my account.
Michelle Eichelberger: and then I click on here, and instead of default, I'm going to change it to homepage.
Michelle Eichelberger: I've already changed this to start on criteria tab when adding editing analysis because it drives me crazy when I want to edit something, and it takes me to the results instead of the edit area. So I would recommend doing that.
Michelle Eichelberger: I'm going to save this.
Michelle Eichelberger: So now, next time when I log in, instead of going to this blank my dashboard page, it's going to go here.
Michelle Eichelberger: which is nice, because if I'm coming back in to work on something I had started, it's going to give me things that I used most recently.
Michelle Eichelberger: Excuse me.
Michelle Eichelberger: Okay.
Michelle Eichelberger: So then, the next thing, let's talk about the catalog.
Michelle Eichelberger: And as I mentioned, the catalog is your stuff. It's stuff from Max libers. It's stuff from the community.
Michelle Eichelberger: The other thing to bear in mind is that you can drag this over, which I have to do all the time, because otherwise it's all squished up, and you can't see what you're looking at.
Michelle Eichelberger: So here are those folders that I mentioned. I don't think I have anything.
Michelle Eichelberger: Oh, it looks like oh, because I'm using the Slc login, which is what we use for all of sls. I can see that some of my colleagues have created some things in here, which is totally fine. This is a good place to work on draft things. As I mentioned.
Michelle Eichelberger: you can create folders, you can do subfolders. There's all kinds of things you can do in here.
Michelle Eichelberger: So that is a good area to know about. That's really your sandbox in terms of playing around creating things, deleting things, doing whatever.
Michelle Eichelberger: And only this will only impact you. You won't be deleting things that other people are using
Michelle Eichelberger: at your campus.
Michelle Eichelberger: So then there's also this shared campus folder. And this is a good place to put things. If you want to make a widget for everyone to be able to implement, or if you want to share a report, those kinds of things, you're going to see this kind of folder for you, for your particular campus, because we're in Fredonia. You can see it's Suny Fredonia, and this is their code for Alma.
Michelle Eichelberger: Excuse me.
Michelle Eichelberger: so there's, you know, a lot of stuff in here that can be shared
Michelle Eichelberger: when I mentioned that.
Michelle Eichelberger: It's always a good idea to go out and see what reports already there before you create one. The 1st place I would always look. Is this Alma Folder?
Michelle Eichelberger: Because this is what ex levers has put in here for you.
Michelle Eichelberger: and there's all kinds of good stuff out here. So if you wanted circulation stats.
Michelle Eichelberger: you'll see there's dashboards. The prompts go with the dashboard, and then the reports that are part of the dashboard are here.
Michelle Eichelberger: So you know, we could.
Michelle Eichelberger: Let's click on reports and just see
Michelle Eichelberger: you know, if you wanted to get this, you could open it up, and it would give you
Michelle Eichelberger: a list of dates and numbers.
Michelle Eichelberger: and you can export. That is actually, now that I think of it, that's 1 of the things. I forgot to put in my slideshow about how to get this data out of analytics. And it's really easy. You can print. You can print it to a Pdf. You can export it. I tend to export it, because then you can mess with it. In. Excel. If you need to switch things around or add more things to it.
Michelle Eichelberger: The formatted works the best in terms of keeping the layout that you're using. So my recommendation would be to use formatted. Excel. If you're going to do that so and then to get back to the catalog, there's probably other ways to do it, but I tend to just click on catalog again, and it will remember where I was which is handy.
Michelle Eichelberger: So there's lots of stuff in here.
Michelle Eichelberger: and you could use
Michelle Eichelberger: the search
Michelle Eichelberger: tool that I mentioned. So if we wanted
Michelle Eichelberger: well, let me think about loans.
Michelle Eichelberger: you would search.
Michelle Eichelberger: and because I'm searching this particular folder, it's going to give me all kinds of loan reports.
Michelle Eichelberger: so you may find things in here that you want to use, and you can use it right from here. Please don't change anything in here. They may have locked this down. It may be just the community ones that are editable by other people, but if you want to make changes. What you would do
Michelle Eichelberger: is you would click on that more and click on copy.
Michelle Eichelberger: And then, if we go back to the catalog
Michelle Eichelberger: because I'm in the catalog. It won't let me go back
Michelle Eichelberger: some way. Yeah, okay, you can switch back and forth in the header here.
Michelle Eichelberger: I'm going to paste it in our sls folder, so I don't mess anything up for Fernonia.
Michelle Eichelberger: so you pick the folder where you want to put it.
Michelle Eichelberger: and then you go down here to the left and you click.
Michelle Eichelberger: click on paste. And so you can see it's here now. So now that it's in, you know, one of our local folders. You can do whatever you want to it.
Michelle Eichelberger: If you did want to make sort of basic edits to it, you would click on the edit
Michelle Eichelberger: option here.
Michelle Eichelberger: And you know. So maybe you want to filter this.
Michelle Eichelberger: and there may be a way, you know, out in the X libraries things. But maybe you just want to manually filter it, you would click on the user group and then click on filter. And then if you click on this dropdown. It's going to give you all the different users for your particular campus.
Michelle Eichelberger: and you could pick summer. You know you could pick whatever one you want.
Michelle Eichelberger: And now, if you look at the results, it would limit it to only those user groups.
Michelle Eichelberger: So there's a lot you can do with that.
Michelle Eichelberger: And it's you know. Sometimes you just have to manually do things there. Oh, my gosh! You could spend like a year of your life learning all the different formulas and sequel, and all the fancy things you can do with this. But sometimes you just want to do one thing so that you could do
Michelle Eichelberger: so. Let's go back to the catalog.
Michelle Eichelberger: and it does not save it when you move it over, but you can always move that over
Michelle Eichelberger: so again. Alma has all the ex libraries reports, and they do have documentation. And we have links to that in our training guides, you know, talking about the different subject areas. They have a libguide that's really handy where you can see the various subject areas and what's included in them, because that really takes a lot of time to figure out what's what and where it is. But then the community folder that I mentioned. If you go to reports.
Michelle Eichelberger: and then you can see their institutions. I know some suny campuses do have their own folder out there, where they have reports that they're willing to share with the community, but if you ever want to look at what we have, if you go to Consortia and then scroll down to Suny.
Michelle Eichelberger: there's a bunch of stuff out here. You know, we've been doing this for over 5 years, so there's probably things that are outdated, or that we need to tidy up. But this is the place where we put reports that we're willing to share with people.
Michelle Eichelberger: I mentioned the ipads, reports. Those are here under statistics
Michelle Eichelberger: and under the acrl ipads. And here's the ipads dashboard.
Michelle Eichelberger: or actually, that's
Michelle Eichelberger: this is the folder. These are the dashboards, and if you wanted to go out and just take a look at them. You could just open them up
Michelle Eichelberger: and take a look.
Michelle Eichelberger: and it'll pull your local data.
Michelle Eichelberger: This takes a little more
Michelle Eichelberger: computing power. You know we're not going to spend a lot of time. I told Scott I wasn't going to share data, and here I am sharing data. So. But that's how you get to those things.
Michelle Eichelberger: and that's mainly what I wanted to show you about the various folders.
Michelle Eichelberger: If you want to create a report from Scratch
Michelle Eichelberger: again. What you would do is click on create.
Michelle Eichelberger: And you're going to do an analysis that's really sort of the the 1st kind of thing you should start playing around with.
Michelle Eichelberger: And if you want to pick a particular area, if you have sushi, you could do things like.
Michelle Eichelberger: think it's electronic usage.
Michelle Eichelberger: let's just do something like physical items. That's something I work in fairly frequently.
Michelle Eichelberger: So once this pops up.
Michelle Eichelberger: you can see, you know, here's the name of the subject area. You can add or switch subject areas if you don't like that one, you know, if it's not giving you what you need. There's this little option here to do that.
Michelle Eichelberger: And then under each of these arrows
Michelle Eichelberger: there is more information. So if I wanted my report to have just the item Creation year. I would grab that and move it over
Michelle Eichelberger: if I wanted the title. That would be part of the bibliographic details which again like, does not seem super intuitive.
Michelle Eichelberger: But there's all kinds of stuff in here, you know. Maybe I want Mms. Id.
Michelle Eichelberger: And I want
Michelle Eichelberger: title.
Michelle Eichelberger: You can see how complicated this is, there's so much in here. So that's why it takes so much trial and error.
Michelle Eichelberger: You know, if you had acquisitions data, you might might want to pull that over. I want to show you one that has a measurement. You can see these are kind of a a blue
Michelle Eichelberger: grid if it's got a measurement. Okay, loan measures
Michelle Eichelberger: that's going to have this. I think it's supposed to be a ruler
Michelle Eichelberger: that
Michelle Eichelberger: is going to be a count of things. And it's going to give you totals. This is just the basic
Michelle Eichelberger: data that's coming into these things.
Michelle Eichelberger: So
Michelle Eichelberger: these are kind of handy to know about. And you know know why, that they look different.
Michelle Eichelberger: and then you can filter, which is something good to learn about.
Michelle Eichelberger: and you can do more advanced filtering and set up prompts and make your report more complicated and sophisticated. But
Michelle Eichelberger: sort of the the hammer approach is to click on the filter. Do you have different options in here less than greater than is not null. That's something to keep in mind, too, because sometimes you run into problems with things that had 0 uses
Michelle Eichelberger: showing up in your report that maybe you don't want to show up in your report so that you might want to use is null at some point as well.
Michelle Eichelberger: But if you click on the dropdown it should show you all the values.
Michelle Eichelberger: So let's just pick that for kicks.
Michelle Eichelberger: And then, as you're going through trial and error, you can click on the results and go back and forth between criteria and results. One thing I should say, too, is.
Michelle Eichelberger: if Alma times out while you're working in here, you're going to lose your data. So make sure to save regularly
Michelle Eichelberger: to start out with. You know, when you're creating it from scratch. You would do a save as
Michelle Eichelberger: I'm gonna just call this test.
Michelle Eichelberger: and I want to make sure to save it in
Michelle Eichelberger: either my my local one
Michelle Eichelberger: or in this shared folder.
Michelle Eichelberger: So we're just going to do this.
Michelle Eichelberger: So now I can see it's been saved. It tells me it's been saved. If I want to look at the results, you just click on the results, tab. And this didn't have any data. So that's you will see this regularly, and that tells me well, I need to go back and play around with this, you know.
Michelle Eichelberger: Maybe the
Michelle Eichelberger: there aren't any loans for things from 1984 that seem suspicious. So if it seems suspicious, it probably is so. There's probably something I did wrong with creating this. But this is really your playground. This is where you can do trial and error. Do some filtering
Michelle Eichelberger: the order of the columns matters, you know. If you'd rather have things sorted by. If you want
Michelle Eichelberger: number of loans to come 1st and then have everything kind of
Michelle Eichelberger: layout. After that you can move those things around. You can change the headers. There's so much you could do.
Michelle Eichelberger: So watch that becoming an expert series, and they'll tell you more about how this all works.
Michelle Eichelberger: So let me check the chat looks good. Let's go back to Alma, and I'll show you how to turn these into widgets, how to share them. Do those kinds of things.
Michelle Eichelberger: So from analytics. We're going to go back to the analytics object list.
Michelle Eichelberger: And most of you have heard from me in the past month or so about some new sushi reports that we set up for the Suny Connect databases, and we created some counter
Michelle Eichelberger: analyses to use to get that data out of Alma.
Michelle Eichelberger: and I have not put that into
Michelle Eichelberger: Fredonia's object list yet, so I was going to use that as my example. So I know where that report lives.
Michelle Eichelberger: If I go to actions. I'm going to add a new Alma analytics object.
Michelle Eichelberger: and it'll give you a drop down of the folders. But if you have a lot of folders. It can take a while to sort through those. So what I want is the
Michelle Eichelberger: oops. My
Michelle Eichelberger: controls are over my area. Okay?
Michelle Eichelberger: So I want it to be in if the report lives in counter reports.
Michelle Eichelberger: and I want to bring in the Drd one. And the reason I'm doing this is because I want to just be able to click on a thing and get to this from Alma. I don't want to have to go out to all my analytics and look around and remember where it lives. This is just a handy way to get to it.
Michelle Eichelberger: So I'm saving it.
Michelle Eichelberger: Okay. So now you can see it shows up on the left. If I wanted to find it, I could just search for it.
Michelle Eichelberger: Because again, once you start adding a lot of analytics. You're gonna have to. It doesn't sort very easily. So you can do a search here by the name, and you can also favorite things. Oh, here it is, pinned analytics, menu. So this would make it so it would be starred. So when you click over here on analytics, you would see
Michelle Eichelberger: your your starred stuff that you have saved. But we're not going to do that right now. Let's go back to here. So once I've got it saved in here. It's going to be really easy to get back to it. All I have to do is click on the view full report.
Michelle Eichelberger: and it brings up the report.
Michelle Eichelberger: So for this particular one.
Michelle Eichelberger: you know, you can choose the date range. Let's just do August through
Michelle Eichelberger: September.
Michelle Eichelberger: and then the vendor. Let's do, Ebsco!
Michelle Eichelberger: Not sure why, it's not letting me do that. But let's see what happens.
Michelle Eichelberger: and what this gives you is a database by database list of all of the sushi data that's been brought in, and it's pretty cool. And if you're manually calculating these things and pulling them in in a monthly report at your campus.
Michelle Eichelberger: Get in touch, and I'd be happy to help you bring this in to your Alma, so you can just pull it up this way. And then again, if you want to get access to it from outside of here, you would click on export and bring it in as a formatted excel
Michelle Eichelberger: file.
Michelle Eichelberger: So that is a handy thing. And then if you wanted to turn this into a widget so you could see it in your Alma all the time. If you scroll down.
Michelle Eichelberger: it is
Michelle Eichelberger: down here. Whoops.
Michelle Eichelberger: you would add as a widget, and then it would be in your add widget area back on the homepage here in Alma.
Michelle Eichelberger: Do that just to show you how it works. You can also schedule the report to run regularly. There's a really lot of things in here that you can do with it. If you wanted to add users who could get to this quickly, you can do that here, either by the specific person or by their role. You know, if you want everybody in circulation to have access to a particular circulation report, you could do that here
Michelle Eichelberger: again. Some of this takes trial and error.
Michelle Eichelberger: I think the schedule is where you can set up who you want to send it to. Whoops.
Michelle Eichelberger: Yes, yep, so this. So you would schedule it, and then you would add subscribers. And then, if you're running this monthly, they would get an email with the report in it.
Michelle Eichelberger: That link I put in the slideshow has a lot more information about this. But
Michelle Eichelberger: this area in the analytics object is where all the sharing happens.
Michelle Eichelberger: So let's
Michelle Eichelberger: there's not really a save because once you do it, it just keeps it. So let's just go back to the homepage, and I'll show you about that widget. This is the add Widget area.
Michelle Eichelberger: and
Michelle Eichelberger: I may not have done the full thing, but basically, if I did it correctly, it would show up in here as a widget that I could add
Michelle Eichelberger: so
Michelle Eichelberger: I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that. I can help you if you run into any trouble with that.
Michelle Eichelberger: But how is everybody doing? I've taken up a lot of time. Are there questions? Is there anything else you wanted me to show sort of for general analytics, kinds of things.
Michelle Eichelberger: Alright.
Michelle Eichelberger: Well, thank you so much for coming. And if you do run into any problems. If you want to start going out there and playing around, just get in touch. And sls is already always happy to help support you with this analytics is great. So go play around. Thank you so much.
Michelle Eichelberger: Going to stop the recording.