Preface

I work as a consultant. Since early, partial, retirement in April 2017 I live near Granada, España where I indulge in dozing in the sun and cycling. Prior to retirement, I spent 15 years at Lancaster University Library as a library systems person. I helped to implement Aleph, Primo and Alma in the library. I was the first coordinator of the IGELU Analytics Special Interest Working Group (SIWG), which is now the Analytics Community of Practice group. In this role I was involved with and presented at ELUNA and IGeLU conferences and at IGeLU Developer Days. I have also organized, and presented at, analytics days and workshops on behalf of EPUG-UKI.

I am not a librarian by training so please excuse all my errors of librarianship. The aim of this material is for librarians to begin to develop capability in AAPL. Analytics capability supported by librarianship and a strong understanding of the libraries data should be a powerful combination. Let us know of any issues you have with this material, we am always looking for ways to improve future versions. The appendices have the necessary details.

Where something is common to Alma, Primo and Leganto the acronym APL, or AAPL for Analytics for APL is used.

Images in the text (figures) are clickable links to be able to see the full size image for clarity, where necessary.

If you see a text item styled like My Dashboard, it indicates something you should look for on the Analytics screens. Mostly this is only used when the item is introduced.

Text styled like,

Analysis  Stock  Loans,

with arrowheads, means follow a menu. So, select Analysis, then Stock, then Loans. Something like:

Ctrl+Shift+N

indicates a keyboard combination.

Computer code is shown in a block. Like:

Data items/columns within "Design Analytics" will be indicated like

For example,

This is following on from the conventions, or syntax, in "Design Analytics" where these are referenced or used, such as within a function, like so:

If the subject area context is clear then the subject area will often be omitted.

"Notes", "Tips", etc, and sidebars look as follows.

The terms "analysis" and "report" are sometimes used interchangeably in this material. Strictly speaking, in OAS terms, "reports" are produced using BI Publisher. They are intended to be for published reporting purposes and to be pixel perfect. You may notice there is a menu link within OAS for creating a new "Report" but this functionality is not available to Alma, Primo or Leganto Analytics users. So, our use of terms more or less interchangeably, even if we try to avoid it, should cause no confusion.

The material was initially developed in partnership with the University of Leeds. There may be references in the text and videos, when using the analytics catalog to:

/Shared Folders/University of Leeds 44LEE_INST/AAPL Training.

The AAPL Training folder can be found at:

/Shared Folders/Community/Reports/Shared Reports/Consultants/libtics.org/AAPL Training

for Alma analytics. Please take a copy of anything you want to modify.

The material is being changed to reflect the new locations in /Shared Folders/Community.

These accompany the text and figures and are useful in seeing exactly how a particular set of actions in designing analyses with AAPL takes place.

The videos are recorded at HD resolution, 1920x1080. If the videos are played in-page they may be viewable, depending somewhat on the content, but they are best viewed if the video is played back in full screen mode. There is an assumption that everybody, wanting to use this material, has a minimum specification PC monitor or laptop display that has a full HD, 1920x1080 resolution screen. Circa 2020, this is a reasonable assumption. YouTube may not always play the videos at HD resolution, you may have to select settings and manually select HD video. Often a video starts up quite grainy before switching to HD fairly quickly. I think this may be down to YouTube’s perception of the network quality between you and itself. It may also be the case that if YouTube has not served a video for a while it may need prompting to serve it at HD resolution.

The videos, often, do not reflect real life processing times while things are being processed in Oracle Analytics. Some processing delays have been edited out of the videos to improve the flow of the demonstrations.

Please excuse some occasional background noise in the videos, children playing, dogs barking, bread/fish/fuel vans tooting to drum up trade, etc. John lives in lively cul-de-sac, in a busy residential town and Spain is not known as the quietest country. Double glazing and curtains only provide so much sound proofing.