12-07-2018, 05:28 PM
Hello All,
I wanted to provide an update on the Alma patron purge that we ran this past Tuesday (12/4). As of Wednesday, the purge had run successfully at 21 of the 23 Alma institutions, and removed just shy of a million expired patron users from our records going back as far as 1995. Removing this unnecessary patron data has certainly lessened our data security liabilities, and will hopefully make it easier for staff to find and manage current users.
While most of these jobs ran fairly quickly, the processing time seems to increase exponentially with larger numbers of patrons. As a result, we are still waiting for this job to be completed for Tidewater and Northern Virginia. I've filed a ticket with Ex Libris for them to be aware, but because the jobs are still progressing (albeit slowly) I'm OK with letting them continue over the weekend at least.
For the most part, the purge seems to have run smoothly. We have been made aware of one circumstance where patrons were purged unexpectedly at some of the colleges. The patron purge uses the "purge date" on the patron record to determine which patrons are eligible for purge. This date is distinct from the "expiry date" which is also part of a patron's account. The new VCCS policy for patron data management of internal users (i.e. community borrowers) is to set the expiry date one year beyond of the day the account is created or renewed, and the purge date an additional one year beyond that. On Tuesday we purged users with a purge date earlier than 12/4/2018 and no active fines/fees/loans. This worked as directed, however, there were some internal accounts where the expiry date had been extended on account renewal, but the purge date had not been adjusted. The result was that some active community borrowers were purged from Alma (if for example, they had an expiry date of 10/10/2019, a purge date of 2/14/2015, and no active fines/fees/loans). I apologize that we had not foreseen this possibility. Unfortunately there is no way to retrieve these purged users at this point, so any affected users will need to be re-registered in Alma. I've submitted a ticket to Ex Libris to find out whether there are any controls which could help avoid a recurrence of this in the future. For now, it is important that purge date be updated alongside the expiry date whenever internal user accounts are renewed.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Best,
Emily
I wanted to provide an update on the Alma patron purge that we ran this past Tuesday (12/4). As of Wednesday, the purge had run successfully at 21 of the 23 Alma institutions, and removed just shy of a million expired patron users from our records going back as far as 1995. Removing this unnecessary patron data has certainly lessened our data security liabilities, and will hopefully make it easier for staff to find and manage current users.
While most of these jobs ran fairly quickly, the processing time seems to increase exponentially with larger numbers of patrons. As a result, we are still waiting for this job to be completed for Tidewater and Northern Virginia. I've filed a ticket with Ex Libris for them to be aware, but because the jobs are still progressing (albeit slowly) I'm OK with letting them continue over the weekend at least.
For the most part, the purge seems to have run smoothly. We have been made aware of one circumstance where patrons were purged unexpectedly at some of the colleges. The patron purge uses the "purge date" on the patron record to determine which patrons are eligible for purge. This date is distinct from the "expiry date" which is also part of a patron's account. The new VCCS policy for patron data management of internal users (i.e. community borrowers) is to set the expiry date one year beyond of the day the account is created or renewed, and the purge date an additional one year beyond that. On Tuesday we purged users with a purge date earlier than 12/4/2018 and no active fines/fees/loans. This worked as directed, however, there were some internal accounts where the expiry date had been extended on account renewal, but the purge date had not been adjusted. The result was that some active community borrowers were purged from Alma (if for example, they had an expiry date of 10/10/2019, a purge date of 2/14/2015, and no active fines/fees/loans). I apologize that we had not foreseen this possibility. Unfortunately there is no way to retrieve these purged users at this point, so any affected users will need to be re-registered in Alma. I've submitted a ticket to Ex Libris to find out whether there are any controls which could help avoid a recurrence of this in the future. For now, it is important that purge date be updated alongside the expiry date whenever internal user accounts are renewed.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Best,
Emily