Reporting Codes

By Julie Brannon
3 min

Alma reporting codes are sets of customizable controlled vocabularies added to purchase orders to support reporting needs. Here are some reminders about reporting codes:

  • Reporting code isn’t a required field, but users will see an Alert when saving the order if they haven't chosen a reporting code.

  • You can add a reporting code to an order at any point in the lifecycle (even when they're closed).

  • All libraries within our Alma instance share reporting codes (we can’t create separate sets of values for Law, Ford, etc).

  • Reporting codes display on invoice lines that are linked to a PO and you can customize your invoice line view to include multiple reporting codes.

Lists of Reporting Code values

Click to expand the two sections below to view more information about the two reporting codes in use:

The PO Line Type in Alma is not as granular as we’d like for our reporting needs and the PO Material Type for electronic orders is not a customizable list. To best accommodate our reporting needs, Reporting Code 1 contains a list of order material types.

Note: Discussion 4/25/24 about open gap to identify Packages

Reporting Code 1

Reporting Code 1

Audio Book

Annual Access Fee

Books on CD

CDROM 

CD Recording

Code/Statute (needed by Law)

Court Report (needed by Law)

Data and Datasets

Database

Digest (needed by Law)

DVD

Electronic Book

Electronic Continuation

Electronic Journal

Electronic Monographic Series

Electronic Newspaper

Electronic Serial

Electronic Sets

Encyclopedia/Sets (needed by Law)

Foreign Primary Material (needed by Law)

Looseleaf Treatise (needed by Law)

Manuscript

Microfiche

Microfilm

Microform

Mixed Material (requested by Rubenstein 8/2/24)

Monographic Series

Map 

Miscellaneous Credit

Miscellaneous Fee

Newspaper

Print Continuation

Print and Electronic Journal

Print and Electronic Serial

Print and Electronic Sets

Print Book

Print Journal

Print Serial

Score

Sets

Supplemental Treatise

Streaming Media  

Video 

Working Tools (Used by Ford)

DUL Collections Services Monograph Acquisitions tracks selector initials using Reporting Code 2. The list of 48 codes uses a three-character initial format in both the code and description:

image-20250102-150937.png

 

Archive

Notes on discussions of other data elements that were considered for Reporting Codes, but not yet implemented in Alma:

“Acquisition Method” in Aleph was used to track publication status of ongoing orders such as “Delayed Publication” and “Suspended”- doesn’t exist in Alma. The team is considering using an Alma Label to capture this.

LC class number in 949 field for tracking specific foreign expenditure.  Usually it is a 1-3 character code.

  • Are there other ways to track the jurisdiction within Alma such as on the invoice or by looking at foreign vendors?

  • It looks like Analytics offers some data elements from MARC in the Fund Expenditure subject area - is that a possibility for this?

  • 5/15/24: Law will think through how to capture this in Alma since it’s captured in MARC - could we build a query looking for the jurisdiction and then join to a list of expenditures? Possibly use a Local Param in analytics? See: Add bibliographic or holding fields to Alma Analytics

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