Library Technology Guides

---

Statistical Report for Alma

Statistics according to type and size categories

The following table presents the 2015 results according to the type and size of the library.

1 Responses for Alma in 2011

0 Responses for Alma in 2010

0 Responses for Alma in 2009

0 Responses for Alma in 2008

0 Responses for Alma in 2007

2022 : gen: 7.02 company 6.52 loyalty 6.87 support 6.02

2021 : gen: 6.83 company 6.55 loyalty 6.76 support 6.14

2020 : gen: 7.06 company 6.79 loyalty 7.11 support 6.23

2019 : gen: 6.70 company 6.38 loyalty 6.60 support 5.86

2018 : gen: 6.55 company 6.33 loyalty 6.58 support 5.87

2017 : gen: 6.58 company 6.50 loyalty 6.72 support 6.04

2016 : gen: 6.53 company 6.48 loyalty 6.88 support 6.27

2015 : gen: 6.37 company 6.61 loyalty 6.94 support 6.26

2014 : gen: 6.43 company 6.67 loyalty 6.96 support 6.33

2013 : gen: 6.20 company 6.80 loyalty 7.31 support 6.73

2012 : gen: 4.86 company 7.14 loyalty 6.43 support 6.14

Comments

We just moved from our own ILS to Alma and Primo from Ex Libris (Type: Consortium)

Alma still has room for improvement, however Ex Libris' aggressive monthly update schedule is closing the gap at a good pace. If they keep this up, it's unlikely that another vendor will be able to match Alma any time soon. (Type: Academic)

We have only recently migrated to ExLibris (August 2015) from Capita's Alto and Prism. (Type: Academic)

We go live in January 2016. While Ex Libris keeps our cohort on a rigorous schedule of weekly phone calls, team meetings, checklists, on-site training session over 3 days, there is much assumed and many gaps that cause the learning curve to be quite steep. All in all, personnel are pleased with the future of this system and changes in workflow. (Type: Academic)

We were told that the new library services platform would be responsive to our university libraries' peculiar and difficult configuration. This has not been exactly the case. We are often told that we should do things another way and not the way we want to do them. We are also reminded regularly that even the changes the vendor agrees to make cause the vendor inconvenience, and that we should change our procedures to align with the technology. The vendor has actually been responsive and we are, for the most part, happy with our system. But we don't like being told that we're not doing things right, from the vendor's point of view. (Type: Academic)

Count includes: print volumes; e-journals, and institutional repositories. (Type: Academic)

Note on number of items - this is items, not titles. Don't think we were able to count e-items previously, hence wild increase. (Type: Academic)

Automatically getting monthly releases is very easy and nice. It is always exciting to discover each month new functionalities and services with so little additional work required from library staff. (Type: Academic)

Note - we now are Alma / Primo customer. (Type: Academic)

We are happy with Ex Libris as a company. Over the last few years they have done a lot to streamline their customer support. Their product development is agile with new functionality released regularly. They're progressive, constantly anticipating future trends in library services. Ex Libris seems to put a lot of resources into R&D - hopefully that will continue under the new Proquest management. (Type: Academic)

customer support was better as we only very recently went back to normal support after implementation, implementation support is very responsive (Type: Academic)

Now that we are out of implementation, we receive slower and less useful support particularly in terms of needed new system development. ExL has several different paths of allowing customers to request new functionality, and they appear to make decisions not holistically but in terms of what's easiest for them to code (without testing the impact of the change system-wide), with a layer of "what's most popular". They have a (mostly) great team of support folks, but it is clear that they are overworked and not in the loop about new developments. (Type: Academic)

Alma is very advanced and is, for the most part, easy to navigate after set up. The discovery interface, Primo, with Alma leaves MUCH to be desired. Ex Libris cannot even explain with any detail how Primo ranks the results. Our subject librarians do not use it and do not train to it. They go directly to the databases. Very disappointing. (Type: Academic)

Alma implementation was a nightmare. Some of it was our fault, but Ex Libris' dealing with us has been very unimpressive, and Salesforce has been, as one employee said: Salesforce has been useless (Type: Theology)

There have been some significant Alma improvements in 2016. Monthly releases are challenging for customers, but new product features included: improvements to automated bibliographic record loading; better integration of Alma with external resource sharing systems, such as ILLiad; and, full migration of Alma APIs to REST.

Support appears to be badly understaffed, both the first-line and more specialized support staff. *This seems to have worsened as Alma’s traction in the library market has increased.* Ex Libris cites Support KPIs in arguing that Support is properly staffed, but ExL leadership's understanding doesn’t match the on-the-ground customer experience.

Development is based at the company's Israel headquarters and its visibility to North American customers is very limited. Likewise, Ex Libris has been opaque in its asserted efforts to improve Alma usability for staff. The Ex Libris user groups appear uninformed about this work, which will supposedly be reflected in production Alma in 2016.

To see Ex Libris dedicate major resources to its campusM mobile solution while there are so many basic problems with its emerging management services product, Alma, is disconcerting. There are few real synergies between campusM (institution-level) and the library solutions sold by Ex Libris.

Both the company and Alma have significant momentum in the marketplace. The impact of the expected merger with ProQuest is unclear. I hope that the merger results in Ex Libris becoming a more open company. (Type: Consortium)

Alma is still a very young product, but is continually improving with rapid monthly releases. (Type: State)

Overall, the customer support received from ExLibris has improved this year over last and most issues have been resolved in a timely manner. The fact that they keep improving on customer support is a real benefit. As we are not in the market to migrate to a new ILS, we are uninterested in exploring Open Source options at this time, but might be interested if the landscape were more mature in that arena. (Type: Academic)

The [...] launched Alma on the 21st of November 2015. Therefore, the evaluation is primarely based on first impressions of the system. (Type: Academic)

We do not have adequate IT support to consider an open source system. (Type: Academic)

We switched to ALMA this year. It is never connected, goes offline constantly, does not provide reports, is difficult to use, is not flexible, and seems to have been rolled out years before it should have been. Many features were lost in the change from Aleph to Alma, and library no longer has control over functions. (Type: Special)

We only went live with Alma in July, so haven't really had enough time to form a fair estimate of the company's product support since implementation. So far the support level feels about the same as with our previous LMS - Capita Alto. (Type: Academic)

The product is new, complex and constantly evolving (Type: Academic)

The Library has only been using its current ILS for 13 months so relatively speaking it is still early days, however the system does not meet a good number of our requirements, and performance is unreliable. System upgrades frequently result in loss of function, and it can be time consuming to have these restored. (Type: Academic)

Clearly, with the transfer of ownership to ProQuest, the future remains to be seen. Early indications are positive, but actual experiences will matter more. Overall, we remain very pleased with the product and company and our issues will likely be addressed as the product matures. (Type: Academic)

Ex Libris is the only company with vision and understanding of the full range of needs of academic libraries. Alma is realizing its potential, especially for the management of e-resources and Primo is improving as the discovery interface for Alma. The other systems out there are poor seconds to Alma/Primo - really just rewrites of older systems. We no longer really care about print management as much but concentrate on the e-resource functionality for our patrons. (Type: )

Alma and Primo integrate reasonably well. However, the back office interface of Primo and the logic behind the relationship b/n Alma and Primo is not always clear. Ex Libris could do a much better job, not only with the Primo front end interface, but with the ability for library staff to make changes to Primo in a more intuitive manner. We are also hoping for positive results from the acquisition of ExLibris by ProQuest. In particular, we hope this will improve the knowledge base inherent in the Alma Community Zone and Primo Central. (Type: Academic)

We migrated to Alma/Primo from Voyager/Primo in early June 2015. On the whole, we are very pleased with the systems. (Type: Academic)

We have been live with Alma since July 2013, and is now very much business as usual. We are now shifting focus to look at - UX testing of our discovery interface (Primo) - improving the efficiency of Library processes through LEAN and more automated integrations - make better use of data; data driven decisions in Collections Development - making use of mobile tech; e.g. checking out a book via your Smartphone Ex Libris have generally been supportive and offered involvement in all of the above, which is beneficial. (Type: Academic)

The University of [...] consortium went live with Alma in May of 2015 and used that opportunity to create a centralized bibliographic repository within Alma network zone. Hence the total number of items listed above increased from 7.8 million (roughly the size of [...] ) to 13 million system wide (this is before any deduplication. We view Alma as an immature product with great potential. Basic functionality is fairly solid though resource sharing of materials across the consortium is labor intensive and wrought with problems. Analytics and the ability to generate custom reports or otherwise assess data is very poorly developed at this time. (Type: Academic)

---

Library Technology Guides is a service provided by Marshall Breeding, independent consultant, author, and speaker.