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Alma Discovery: Primo VE

Content

There's a wide variety of content that can be made discoverable in Primo VE:

  • Physical and electronic bibliographic records and holdings from Alma
  • Articles, book chapters, videos, etc. from the Central Discovery Index (CDI)
  • External content like repository data or LibGuides
  • Resource Recommender results created by library staff

Availability

In general, content availability follows these guidelines:

  • Alma physical and electronic bib records: changes should show in Primo within 15 minutes
  • CDI changes like search activation or deactivation or new title activation: 48-72 hours
  • Discovery Collection changes: may need reindexing, sometimes slow to roll out

Note that because SUNY uses a Network Zone (NZ), any changes to NZ-linked records or Community Zone (CZ) records may need intervention in the NZ to go into effect. Contact SUNY Library Services if you have any trouble with getting your changes to show in your Primo instance.

SUNY FAQs:

Course Reserves

You can set up your course reserves in Alma and make a separate search profile or slot for them in Primo VE.

Ex Libris Resources:

Collection Discovery

You can set up groups of titles in Alma and make them discoverable in Primo VE using Discovery Collections. For example, you collect documents, artwork, DEI titles, etc. Note that it's not possible to add content like articles or other records from the Central Discovery Index to these kinds of Collections.

See also the section on importing external content below.

Ex Libris Documentation:


SLS FAQs:

SLS Training Videos: 

Resource Recommender

Resource Recommender is a way to push recommendations to the top of your search results if a user searches for a specific topic. You could create recommendations for subject specialists, databases, library hours, etc. You can populate the Resource Recommender lists either manually, or through exports from external sites like LibGuides.

resource recommender example

 

Ex Libris Documentation:


SUNY FAQs:

External Content (LibGuides, DSpace, etc.)

You can harvest content from external sources and make it discoverable in Primo VE.

  • Discovery import profiles let you push content directly into Primo VE, but you can't see and manage the titles in Alma.
  • Digital import profiles are more complicated to set up, but give you more control of the content because you import it into a collection and can then see and manage the titles.

Ex Libris Documentation:

 

SLS FAQs:

SLS Training Videos:

Open Access

There is a large amount of Open Access content available for activation in the Community Zone, but be aware that many of these packages may include outdated links or content that is only partially OA.

SLS Training Videos:

SLS FAQs: