Permissions and Role Management

Background information

Using Roles and Role Profiles

Alma calls permissions “roles”. Examples of roles in Alma include “Circulation Desk Operator”, “Purchasing Manager”, and “Cataloging Administrator”.

Alma also has a feature called “role profiles”, where we can create custom grouping of roles with Duke-specific names. The idea is to support creating a role profile for a specific type of job, and then assigning the role profile to the user, so that each user with that type of job gets the same set of roles. We will assign roles to Duke users of Alma using this feature.

Scoping

Many roles also include the idea of “scoping”, which allows restricting a role to records or workflows owned by specific libraries. We apply scoping to some, but not all, permissions. In general, the following applies:

• Cataloging roles cannot be scoped and apply to the entire Duke institution;

• Physical inventory roles are not scoped for collection services staff, catalogers and acquisitions staff; they are scoped for fulfillment and circulation staff.

  • Circulation and fulfillment in DUL libraries who can edit item records are scoped to Perkins; Lilly; Music; Divinity; LSC; and the Marine Lab.

  • Circulation and fulfillment staff at professional school libraries are scoped to item records owned by their library.

    • Note that if circulation and fulfillment staff also have responsibilities in collection services, they may get privileges to edit records at other libraries through those job responsibilities.

• Circulation and fulfillment roles are scoped to the circulation desk where the staff member works (attaching these roles to a circulation desk is an Alma requirement.)

• Staff who manage requests, including work orders, have that work scoped to the department managing the request (this is an Alma requirement.)