With libraries worldwide continuing to rely on Alma™ to support increasingly complex workflows and collections, the May 2026 Feature Release introduces new AI-powered capabilities, streamlined acquisitions processes, and enhanced collaboration tools designed to improve efficiency across institutions and consortia.
Leading this release are several advancements in Alma’s AI-driven functionality. A new “Enrich Bibliographic Records” job streamlines copy cataloging through automated enrichment and AI title matching, helping libraries enhance records more efficiently while maintaining full review and approval control. The AI Metadata Assistant now supports Azure Document Intelligence and Tesseract OCR technologies, improving metadata extraction quality for multilingual and non-Latin resources.
Acquisitions processes become more intelligent and automated with the introduction of AI-powered invoice creation from PDF and image files, reducing manual data entry and simplifying invoice processing. In addition, the Alma AI Assistant for funds and ledgers now supports direct actions such as fund transfers, allocations, and activation workflows from within the conversational interface.
The release introduces greater flexibility for electronic resource management. Institutions can now prioritize online services with current-year coverage, helping users identify the most relevant content more effectively. Alma further expands portfolio management options by allowing institutions to keep perpetual access portfolios active after removal from the Community Zone, reducing the need for manual reactivation.
Fulfillment networks and consortia benefit from stronger synchronization capabilities in this release. User record updates now propagate automatically across fulfillment network institutions in real time, ensuring linked accounts remain synchronized and up to date. Libraries can enforce borrowing and request restrictions across the network based on local patron limits such as overdue thresholds, fines, and loan limits.
Consortia environments gain additional governance protection with new safeguards for shared rules. Shared rules – including normalization, merge, brief level, authority headings, and indication rules – can now be protected from unintended edits or deletion, helping institutions maintain greater consistency across Network Zones.
The release delivers usability improvements for Linked Open Data workflows. A new table view for BIBFRAME records in the Linked Open Data Editor provides a more structured and human-readable display, making metadata easier for catalogers to review and manage.
These updates are part of our ongoing commitment to improving Alma through customer-focused innovation, automation, and ease of use.
Explore the full list of May features in our Release Notes on the Ex Libris Knowledge Center.
You can view the May What’s New videos on the Knowledge Center.
The next quarterly release is scheduled for August 2026.
