1. Letter Emails How to change fixed text labels in the letters
Yoel Kortick Senior Librarian

2. Letter Emails (Labels)
The actual configuration of the letters is done under ‘Configuration > General > General Configuration’

3. Letter Emails (Labels)
Letter s = Allows staff to configure the labels (text) of each letter without needing to edit the actual xsl of the letters.
For a full list of all Alma letters see the “Alma Letters” table at

4. Letter Emails (Labels)
As an example of how the “Letter s” functionality works we will take a look at the letter “Borrowing Activity Letter” which has code FulUserBorrowingActivityLetter (see table referred to in previous slide)
This letter is sent to patrons with activity and contains a list of all the patron’s loans, overdue items, and active fines. It is sent either by a job (Notifications – Send Periodic Fulfillment Activity Report) or manually by click “send activity report” from the patron services screen.

5. Letter Emails (Labels)
For example from the Patron Services screen (Fulfillment > Manage Patron Services > Retrieve Patron) we will click “Send Activity Report”

6. Letter Emails (Labels)
Part of the letter appears as follows (this particular institution may have already done some customizations from the default):

7. Letter Emails (Labels)
The institution decides that it wants to change the text “We would like to remind you that you have the following items at your disposal: ” to “We are bringing to your attention that you have the following items from the library:”.

8. Letter Emails (Labels)
From the “Letter s” link the full list of letters appears. We will edit “Borrowing Activity Letter”

9. Letter Emails (Labels)
The specific text we saw in the letter comes from this line in the table with label “reminder_message”:
We will edit label “reminder_message”:

10. Letter Emails (Labels)
We replace the original text with the new text and save

11. Letter Emails (Labels)
Now we will send the letter again and we see that the text has changed

12. Letter Emails (Labels)
What happened behind the scenes?
In the the xsl of the letter (which we can see via the ‘Customize Letters’ link and is discussed in depth in separate presentation) each label appears.
Whenever a label appears it has signs before and after it.
When the letter is produced Alma takes the text for each label in the xsl from the list of labels.
In this way users can easily change standardized text without needing to exit the actual xsl.

13. Letter Emails (Labels)
Each label appears in the xsl. Below is example for “reminder_message”:

14. Letter Emails (Labels)
Label in the xsl
Corresponding label in “Letter s”

15. Thank you