There may be times when you need to create patrons in Alma manually. For example, if a new student comes to the circulation desk and for some reason they are not yet in Alma. Or, if you need to create a new community borrower. The most important thing to remember when creating patrons manually: if you are creating a student, faculty, or staff account, you must be sure to enter their institution id number as their primary ID, as this will be used later to match them up when the user is added to banner and is then synced with Alma.

Below are the instructions for manually creating internal and external users.

In most cases, users who will be logging into Alma/Primo via an external system, such as CAS or SAML, will be external users. These will usually be students, staff, etc.

Those users that only have to login to Alma/Primo and don't otherwise interact with the institution, such as retired staff, the local high school, etc, will be internal users.

It is important to note that the Primary Identifier should be unique across all your institution's uses. That is, if an internal user ever changes to external, and the Primary Identifier then conflicts, user data could be lost.

1) Login to Alma and go to Administration->User Management->Find and Manage Users. NOTE: If you don't see the "Find and Manage Users" link on your menu, please scroll to the bottom of the page and utilize the alternate method for adding patrons.

2) On the Find and Manage Users page, select Add User->Public

3) You should now see this screen:

4) Fill in the information required (all fields with the red * are required)

The Primary Identifier (usually a nine digit number) needs to be unique within Alma. If it is not, you will get a warning. It is also advantageous to make these unique across your institution's external users. If a user with external type with the same Primary Identifier is imported into Alma, the internal user may be overwritten during the process.

Most often the User group field will decide the permissions of the user, so be sure to set this appropriately.

For a password, it is useful to make a generic one, such as Firstname_Lastname1. Then check the box that says "Force password change on next login". This will cause the user to have to create their own unique password the first time that they login. However, this doesn't force them to change the password if they login through Primo, so see out changing password in Primo tutorial for how to do that. (On this site, under Primo(OPAC))

The Expiration date is a date in which afterward the user can no longer access Alma/Primo. Their profile will remain intact, but they won't be able to log in until their Expiry date has been changed to a future date.

Below is some sample information

5) You can now click "Save and Continue" in the upper right corner

6) Note that the user has the role of Patron by default. All users are required to have at least one role.

External users are patrons whose information is managed by an external system and who can login via an external system using protocols like CAS or SAML

1) You must manually create an internal user first, so follow the steps prior to this

2) On the Find and Manage Users (under Admin->User Management), search for the user you want to change to external

3a) You can select the User's name to edit their information, or

3b) You may alternatively select the "..." button on the user, then select "Edit"

4) Now select "Toggle Account Type"

5) Confirm in the pop-up

6) The user is now set as an external user

1) Go to the Alma Menu and select "Manage Patron Services" under Fulfillment\Checkout-Checkin

2) First, scan for their ID or search their name to be sure they aren't already in the system, and if not, click "Register New User"

3) Scroll up to the top of this page and continue from Step 3 in the main INSTRUCTIONS section