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Understanding Alma patron identifiers

Understanding Alma patron identifiers

Primary identifier

All Alma user accounts must have a primary identifier.

  • If the account was migrated from Aleph to Alma:

    • and they had a netid in Aleph

      • then the netid became the primary identifier on their Alma account

      • the Aleph user ID was migrated as an identifier of type System number

Note that if the account was migrated from Aleph to Alma, and then the Alma patron loader started to update the account, the System number would have been removed from the account because it was migrated as an external identifier.

  • If the account was migrated to from Aleph to Alma

    • and they did NOT have a netid in Aleph

      • then the Aleph user ID became the primary identifier on the Alma account, with a prepended “ID” as part of the migration - e.g., an Aleph user ID of “ID0454963” because a primary identifier of “IDID0454963” in Alma.

Other identifiers

  • Duke ID

    • If the netid is the user’s primary identifier, than the Duke ID is the unique ID for the user

  • Barcode

  • Phone ID

  • Watch ID

  • TIP ID

Weirdness with identifiers

  • You will see ‘03’ identifiers for several thousand users in Analytics. This happened when a user had duplicate Duke netids on their account in Aleph and then were migrated to Alma. The migration code picked one to make the primary identifier, and then brought over the others, but didn’t enable the netid as an identifier type so you won’t see them as extra identifiers in the UI. Because you won’t see these identifiers in the UI, you can’t get rid of them in Analytics.