As the process of loading patrons into Alma does not automatically remove inactive or expired accounts, OhioNet will be administering an automated job to purge users from OPAL’s system. This job is slated to run monthly and will only remove patron accounts that have been expired for three years from each OPAL members’ respective Alma instance. To ensure that the appropriate accounts are removed, please see the details below regarding the process of marking a patron account as inactive and removing these accounts from Alma.
Before a patron is formally removed from Alma, their account will first be marked as Inactive. This will prevent the user from being able to continue accessing their account and library content until they are officially removed via the purge job. A weekly automated job managed by OhioNet will update the patrons’ status if they have been expired for seven or more days.
If a patron’s account is inactive and needs to be reinstated (Examples: A former student reenrolls in the institution; A former faculty/staff member is re-hired, etc.), OPAL staff members can use the following instructions to update the respective account:
1. Navigate to the patron’s account in Alma and select their name to begin editing.
2. If the account is External, use the Toggle Account Type button at the top of the screen to make the account Internal. This will allow you to edit the account.
3. In the Status field, select “Active” from the dropdown menu.
a. If you are unsure when the patron will be included in your next patron load f ile, you can also update the Expiration Date field to ensure that the account does not get re-updated back to Inactive by the weekly job.
4. If you needed to toggle the account from External to Internal, be sure to select the Toggle Account Type button again to return it to External.
5. Select the Save button at the top of the screen.
For OPAL members uploading patron data to Alma via SIS loads, it’s important to set the patron account to External, as this will ensure the account will be updated when the next patron load is processed.
If you have multiple accounts to reinstate, you can add the accounts to a Set and run the Update/Notify Users job to update the relevant fields listed above.
The monthly purge job is run using a Logical Set managed by OhioNet that contains all patron accounts that have been expired for over three years. This means that only accounts whose Expiration Date field is over three years old will be removed from Alma. Accounts that have expired but are still within that three-year period will be updated to Inactive and retained in the system.
As Community Patrons are often added ad hoc, and not via a particular load file, it’s recommended that OPAL libraries maintain a Set specifically containing these accounts. This will allow OPAL libraries to easily update those accounts as needed to ensure the appropriate patrons are excluded or included in the monthly purge job.