How We Got Here

A bit of background . . .

• Adam Kauwenberg-Marsnik, Randi Madisen and Lacey Mamak did a presentation on IPEDS at the Fall 2016 MnPALS User Groups Meetings. 
• In fall 2019, a subset of the Reports Work Group started to identify key Alma reports for IPEDS for MnPALS members. If you search for IPEDS in the Alma Analytics Shared folders, you get over a 1000 items. There is a lot of variety in how institutions approach IPEDS and it does take some work to find the best reports. Some key resources were Mannino’s 2018 ELUNA presentation and CalState’s Work on ACRL and IPEDS.
• In January 2020, Randi Madisen, Laura Hoelter and Jill Holman revised the presentation and did a webinar for MnPALS members.

The first version of this resource on Pressbooks collected what we learned while gathering our IPEDS numbers in spring 2020. While people have been doing IPEDS for years, there were several extra complications in spring 2020:

• We had recently migrated to a new library system, so data needed to be combined from Alma and Aleph.
• Alma Analytics uses Oracle BI, which was new to most of our people and has a bit of a learning curve.
• The institutions in our consortium are varied in size, staffing and configuration. Designing reports that will work for everyone is difficult.
• Resource Sharing (Interlibrary Loan) had been recently introduced in Alma so there weren’t many reports already available on which we could draw.
• Many vendors were making the transition from Counter 4 to Counter 5.
• We transitioned from PCI to CDI in January 2020.
• The worldwide pandemic radically changed everyone’s work. (The pandemic was declared March 11, 2020. The original IPEDS deadline for keyholders was April 8, 2020 and it was extended to April 22, 2020.)

For spring 2021, we made changes based on questions raised through our support center tickets. We also incorporated some changes based on work at Orbis Cascade.

For spring 2022, because many members had moved their electronic collections to the Network Zone, we pulled data from the NZ on June 30, 2021 and provided it to members.

For spring 2023, PALS developed a program to combine data from both NZ and IZ, for both Alma and Alma Analytics. The program is available here. PALS staff discussed this project at Eluna Learns 2022.

Thank you to everyone for your contributions!