Administering Letters and Notices

Letters are managed in Configuration > General > Letters
We only support email letters and are not using WEBHOOK or SMS as of Fall 2024
Only about a third of the letters are enabled - that can be seen in Configuration - they are mostly fulfillment-related, with a few other systems related letters.
A group of fulfillment staff worked in Spring 2024 to customize most of the patron facing letters. Customizations are stored in gitlab at https://gitlab.oit.duke.edu/alma-integrations/letters-configuration. If you make any changes to letters, you must capture the changes over in gitlab as well!

As part of email configuration, we have to set an email for all of Alma that is used as the “from” email - currently it’s set to duke-alma-email@duke.edu in the Mail Handling Integration profile. It must be a valid duke email address in order for email to be delivered. See Mail configuration
For a subset of emails that Ex Libris considers to be circulation related, it can be configured to use the circulation communication email address on the library that owns the item. This is done by setting separate_patron_notifications_by_library to TRUE. See Fulfillment Library Independence
- This means that every library needs a circulation communication email even if you don’t ever expect to circulate email from that library. By default, it can be set to the duke-alma-email@ address if there are really no other options.
- One thing about this feature that is buggy is that the “On Hold Shelf Letter” is sent from the Owning Library, not the pickup library. So if someone gets an item from Ford sent to Perkins, the letter telling them that their hold is ready for pickup is sent from Ford. This was reported in May 2024 and the conversation was left at Ex Libris support saying that it was a documentation defect, Duke disagreeing, our vendor consultant saying we were right and they would follow up, but nothing past that point.

Components are reusable across letters
We have customized some components and some letters, so you may need to look at both when troubleshooting an issue
If you want to test a component change, the easiest thing to do is to change it and then send yourself a Borrower Report from your user record - that email can be triggered and sent in real-time.