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Aleph v18 Acquisitions and Serials

Update July 7, 2008: Acquisitions FY Rollover

We had a report from one institution that they were seeing different results from the FY rollover services than had been seen in previous years. We now believe the reason we were seeing the slight differences from previous years' rollovers is because of possible changes from v.15.5 to v.18 and due to the fact the .01 cent encumbrances were sometimes being updated to greater, more meaningful amounts. Our current understanding is that the renew order encumbrance services are performing as they should.

When an item has an encumbrance and a payment has been made, then the system should zero out the encumbrance for that item in the current fiscal year, since it now has an expenditure. When the renew order encumbrances have been run for the new fiscal year, they look for open orders and at the original encumbrance in the previous year, and encumber the original amount to the new -2009 year. This would make the new -2009 encumbrance total greater than the ending -2008 encumbrance total. However, we are still seeing a few inconsistencies for specific orders in the way the system should be handling the -2009 encumbrances. These inconsistent results are being investigated, but feel overall the budget rollovers are functioning as they should. As always, please let me know if you have any unexplainable results. – Ellen


Acquisitions FY Rollover


It's that time of year to begin thinking about the end of the fiscal year and the opening of FY 08/09 procedures in ALEPH. I have already spoken with Acq staff at several universities, but wanted to alert the PC's of the upcoming procedures. Please share this information with all appropriate Acquisitions staff. Let them know they can coordinate a time for the FY rollover anytime after June 30th.

A new option in the rollover services is available with v.18. You can now filter by Order Unit or Sublibrary, depending on your Acquisitions setup, to rollover and re-encumber specific budgets and orders. However, I would strongly encourage everyone to continue the institution wide coordination of the FY rollover. If anyone is interested in this option, please contact me so we can discuss the various issues involved.

Budget Rollover is a v.18 document that explains the various end of fiscal year services:
1) Open Annual Budget (acq-05) creates new annual budgets with a new suffix for the new year (Books-2009). The budget must be marked as an Annual Budget for the new year budget to be created. There is an option for the new annual budget to be created without an initial allocation or the same amount as the previous year. This service must be run first in the sequence.
2) Renew Order Encumbrance for Monograph (acq-06-a) checks for annual budgets that have been encumbered for each order with an open order status. If the encumbrance for the order is still active, the encumbrance will be assigned to the new year's budget.
3) Renew Order Encumbrances for Serials and Standing Orders (acq-06-b) same as service for monographs. Must be run twice, once for Serials and once for S/O.
4) Transfer Remaining Balance (acq-07) has the option of transferring the funds remaining in the annual budgets at the end of the year to the new year's annual budgets. If you do not transfer the remaining funds, the service can also be used for changing the status of all the old budgets to NA, non-active.

I recommend doing your initial testing in Test since this will give you an opportunity to view how the services affect your data and will create your new budgets for updating your Test database. In addition the ARROW clean-up reports are available that will identify aging invoices, incomplete orders and aging SV orders. Hopefully these will help you to identify invoices and orders that need some sort of status change to ensure their proper rollover. For example, a listing of SV orders that are paid and/or arrived but not closed.

When you're ready to run the year-end services in Production, please let Ellen Bishop know and she'll back-up appropriate Oracle tables just in case there's a problem. Also, Ellen will put the rollover services on your Production client Services menu.


New Acquisitions features available on V18


  • Arrival: Message to the initiator of the order sent by email or printed letter.
  • Invoices: Unit Price Exceeds Estimated Price. When a new invoice is created or an existing one modified and the actual unit price exceeds the estimated unit price by more than a defined percentage, an alert message will be displayed. This percentage is customizable per institution.
  • Enhancement of the Claim window: When a claim is sent to a vendor (via e-mail/EDI/print), the print format and date are recorded in the order log. In addition, each time a claim is modified (for example: for the addition of a vendor reply), the information is recorded in the order log.
  • Vendor List: The starting point and the "Sort by..." parameter (Name or Code) in "Vendor List" can be saved in .\Alephcom\Tab\Alephcom.ini, under a new section - "[VendorList]". Whenever these parameters are changed, they are saved in the relevant section of the alephcom.ini file.
  • Action Log Messages is a new window that can be accessed from the Administration pane. The Action Log Messages window displays all log transactions where the transactions whose Action Date is later than their Open Date and the Action Date does not exceed the Current Date. The Order button allows you to jump from each log message to its related order. The Dismiss button allows you to dismiss the transaction log entry for the list. This window also can be used to display all responses from a vendor received via EDI.
  • Budgets: There is now an option that is more user-friendly for two-way money transfer between budgets. The two transfer arrow buttons are enabled only when both budgets are valid and their information is displayed, and the sum to transfer is greater than zero.
  • Arrival Form: The arrival function has been enhanced with an option for a pop-up message to appear if any of the arrived items has been requested.
  • Claim Form: Expected Arrival Date: A new section has been added to the Arrival form when adding a new arrival for Serial and Standing orders. The section is added to handle EDA (expected date of arrival) field and includes the following new fields:
    • Auto Update Expected Arrival Date check box - When a new claim is added, this check box is selected by default.
    • Exp. Arrival Date field - When the Auto Update Exp. Arrival Date check box is selected, this field is populated with zeros and cannot be changed. When the Auto Update Exp. Arrival Date check box is cleared, this field is populated with the current EDA on the server, and can be exchanged by the staff user for a specific date.
  • EDI DESADV message is now supported by ALEPH. A DESADV message is sent by the vendor whenever the periodical issues are sent physically to the library. This message identifies all the issues in the package. When this message is loaded, the issues that are mentioned in the message are marked as checked-in: the check-in date of the issue is updated and the issue process status is changed to blank.
  • EDI ORDERS message: The material type information is now added to EDI ORDERS outgoing messages.
  • Invoice Form:
    • Expected Arrival Date: When adding a new invoice to the system, there is an option to set the material as checked in. When the staff user chooses Yes, an arrival record is created.
    • Line items pane: In order to confirm that the invoice is added to the correct bibliographic record, when adding a new line item invoice, the system now displays the short bibliographic information associated with the linked order in the upper part of the lower pane of the screen. The display can be configured to include BIB information and some of the linked HOL data.
  • Invoice Printing: A Print button that allows printing invoice information has been added to the general invoice view. The printout includes general and line invoice information, as well as information on whether the invoice lines are all fully budgeted and whether or not they cover the general invoice sum.
  • Order Form: A new field, Claim Date, has been added to the vendor tab of Serial and Standing orders. The field lets the user view and set up EDA. This field can be updated by the user, and in this case the data which is entered will be saved in the Claim date field. The field can contain zeros. When sending the order, the system will update the Claim date field with a valid date value.
  • Two new fields have been added to the Order Record: The fields have been added in order to be able to handle the acquisition process of electronic resources in Verde, which will interact with ALEPH Acquisitions:
    • ERM Type (or Material Format), can be either "PRN" (Print) or “ELC" (Electronic)
    • ERM ID - the Acquisition's ID in the Verde system
  • ISBN Field Check: ALEPH now supports the 13-digit ISBN. The 13-digit ISBN always begins with "978", followed by the core 9-digit number and a recalculated check digit. Both 10-digit ISBNs and 13-digit ISBNs are considered valid. The ISBN validity check routine is capable of validating both types.
  • Order Index List: A new order index has been added - AON (Additional order number) based on Order Number 3.
  • Vendor Address for Letters: There is a new option to place the country and the postal code on different lines. Up until now, the last part of a Vendor Address, edited for letters, contained the name of the country followed by the postal code on the same line - provided, of course, that these two fields were not empty.
  • Vendor Fields: A new field called Mail Attachment has been added. This field defines how vendors receive e-mail messages. The following options are available:
    • H - Attachment Only
    • P - E-mail Body Only
    • B - Attachment and E-mail Body

New Serials features available in V18

  • Enhancements to supporting 853/853x patterns. Still not completely MARC compliant and has trouble with the omit code in the y subfield.
  • 19 new pattern templates
  • Prediction patters:
    • Numbering schemes can only be defined in cataloging GUI not ACQ/Serials
    • “^” can be used as place holder for lacking first level of enumeration
  • Summary holdings: the new summary holding features need to be tested in depth as they can have profound implications on the display of data in the GUI and in the public OPAC>
    • Expand program creates 863/4/5 based on arrival
    • Expand program creates 866/7/8 for summary on WEB OPAC - It is unclear how this will interact with MANGO.

Last modified 7 July 2008 at 5:40 pm by ellen