Our presentation will cover: Creation of drill down queries within our annual/monthly reports. The function of drilling down into a report allows our librarians and staff to: identify the items “behind the numbers” allows them to find and correct problems with our data in Alma

1. Using Drill Down within
Alma Analytics Reports
Linda Salvesen, Systems Librarian & Ray Schwartz, Head of Library Systems
William Paterson University of NJ, Cheng Library
ENUG 2021 | Wednesday October 27, 2021

2. About us
• William Paterson University
• public mid-size four-year
university in northern NJ
• We were a Voyager (Endeavor)
site since 2003
• In the summer of 2019, we
went live with Alma and Primo
(Ex Libris)

3. About this presentation
• Our presentation will cover:
• Creation of drill down queries within our annual/monthly reports.
• The function of drilling down into a report allows our librarians and staff
to:
• identify the items “behind the numbers”
• allows them to find and correct problems with our data in Alma
• What we mean by ‘drill down’:
• The ability to click on a particular result in the general report to
retrieve more specific results.

4. Reporting before Alma
• With Voyager, we had full SQL access to the data.
• We wrote numerous web pages/scripts in Cold Fusion and/or Perl
to query Voyager’s Oracle database management system.
• Data was sent through either:
• scheduled email reports
• on-demand web forms
• Reports were either in HTML or Excel.

6. Three areas of reporting…
…at the moment, where we are using some drill down
functionality:
• Current inventory counts
• Monthly addition / deletion counts
• Targeted monthly collection development report for
liaison librarians (selectors)

7. For example …

8. References
Ex Libris Documentation
• Linking from Analytics Reports
• ADVANCED ANALYTICS Technical Seminar 2018
• Covers ‘action links’ aka ‘drill down’
• How do I create a Pivot Table in Alma Analytics?
• Analytics, Documentation
• Analytics, Best Practices and How-Tos
• Presentations and Documents – Analytics

9. Other documentation
Oracle Business Intelligence Documentation
• Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Service
Harvard Wiki
• Analytics & Reporting, Harvard Wiki

10. Thank you
Linda Salvesen (salvesenl@wpunj.edu)
Ray Schwartz (schwartzr2@wpunj.edu)