Alma Basics
Information excerpted from an email sent by Alexa on 09-13-22.
Competency in any system is highly dependent on your job duties. And since nobody is doing the exact same job as anybody else, everyone will need slightly (or very) different skills.
Everyone, regardless of their job description, should feel comfortable navigating and searching in Alma. The following will get you started on navigation and searching.
Ex Libris provides extensive training for all of its products, including Alma, through its Knowledge Center. However, the Knowledge Center is massive and notoriously unfriendly to new learners. If you are looking for the absolute basics, then you can view the Alma Orientation series of videos. The series takes about 15 minutes to get through and handouts are provided with each video.
We also have some documentation on navigating and searching in Alma:
In 2020, Alma introduced a new user interface. Though a few years old now, we have videos detailing navigation and customization in the new UI. Each video is only a few minutes long and includes some catchy(?) royalty-free tunes.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ICZ8y8TidT6AoJmhi5-OB_bCSB4FB5zz?usp=sharing
There is also a Quick Alma Tips document which boils down a lot of information into five pages. If you don’t even know how to get into Alma start here.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rxGAcLqKzN7ITMRNHjUc4zC1MZmoW63M/view?usp=sharing
Still want more? The Drive folder below has slides, handout, and session recording focused on searching in Alma. The session starts with searching in Primo. You can skip through this and go straight to the Alma portion or watch the whole thing to get a better idea of how the two products are dependent on one another. Also, the handout has lots of links to more in-depth Ex Libris documentation on searching.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1qIcMBvU0FCDs2-hExroLEKDE7E_5GHSn?usp=sharing