SLC FAQs

Lynn's notes continued: "Here is a good summary of how availability statuses work in Primo:

 (From

https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Primo/Product_Documentation/Technical_Guide/160Mapping_to_the_Normalized_Record/030Alma_MARC_21#Availability_Statuses_from_Alma but please disregard the rest of this documentation as it’s for classic Primo)

 

The availability status is calculated by Alma per location, but Primo displays the availability based on all locations. For example, if the same serial holding exists in two locations, which have the Check holding and Available statuses respectively, Primo will display the Available status since the holding is available at one of the locations.

 

The final availability statuses are determined as follows:

For the Calculated Availability Text Labels table, there will likely be multiple lines which need to be changed for each status.  For example, for "Not Available" there are two:

This is true for other statuses, such as "Checked out...," "Online Access," etc.  The reason for this is that there are different delivery codes assigned by Primo depending on if the item is from Alma or Primo Central, if the item is completely unavailable (i.e., all copies checked out) or partially unavailable (i.e., checked out by your institution but available at another institution), etc.  This table covers all possibilities."

---

Janette Rozene asked "Some of our periodicals in Primo have the message "May be available" and others say "Available" and some say both!  What controls this and how do we change to "Available"?" Here are a few of her examples:

Lynn replied:"May be available" usually indicates no or partial items (i.e., the not arrived status you mentioned).

Janette posted: "So if we eliminate the "Technical migration" item process status NA "not arrived", the message "May be available" might disappear. Since our data will be over-written, I am not sure if this should be done on the Aleph side now or the Alma side later." and Laura Jacobs noted that you can suppress on order issues from displaying in VE, see https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Alma/Product_Documentation/010Alma_Online_Help_(English)/060Alma-Primo_Integration/030Publishing_Alma_Data_to_Primo/040Excluding_Resources_with_Specific_Process_Types_from_Publishing As a follow-up, Janette reported "our staff figured out that many of our serials issues had the Aleph "item process status" set to OP "out of print" when the publication prediction pattern generated expected issues that we did not own.  Because Alma does not have a field corresponding to "item process status", these are all flagged as "TM", technical migration.  She tested deleting the "Technical migration" out of print item and found that the Primo display changes from May be available to Available. So we will remove the out of print serial items designated TM before migration."

---

Joe Riggie asked: "We have just a single item record for our print serials and a coverage statement in the holdings record. I suspect many other SUNY's have something similar.

As a result, Primo shows the green Available if we hold the title, but lacking item records with enum and chron it really doesn't know if we have the issue in question (we usually don't).

The holdings statement appears in ghostly grey and is generally accurate, but if I were a patron all I would see is the green AVAILABLE

I need some way to change that green Available to something more ambiguous - 'may be available' or 'limited print holdings'

It's on my list of things to explore -  I just haven't gotten to it yet.

Anybody else in the same boat? Any elegant solutions (that don't involve creating 1000's of item records...)"

Lynn replied:

"Joe, for your scenario where you have a print serial with just a single item record, Primo is seeing it as AVAILABLE because the one item is indeed available and because of the missing chron and enum fields.  From the Primo side, you could change the AVAILABLE label in the Getit Tile Labels table to CHECK AVAILABILITY or AVAILABLE (PARTIAL OR FULL) or HELD BY LIBRARY or something along those lines.  The important thing to keep in mind however is that this is going to change the AVAILABLE label for *all* available items.  As described above, “Primo displays the availability based on all locations,” so there isn’t a way to control labels on a more specific level.  I’ll forwarded this to Pam, Svetlana and Laura to see if there is something else that can be done on the Alma side other than item creation."

 

Lynn also noted that Joe could change the color of the Available message font by wrapping the description in the code table with <font color="<color>"><description></font>. 

 

---

Primo's display of articles within print journals that the library owns

There are several things that affect the way that availability displays for your print holdings:

• Metadata from Alma is at the journal name level, not at the article level. This means that even if you have print holdings for an article, Primo won't know this until after you open the full article record because that's when Primo VE checks for locally held records, PCI records and records from openURL. This means that you may not get search results for something that you own unless you choose "Expand Results." As Lynn states: "Essentially, the record for the physical journal the library owns doesn't have article titles, so anything outside of what the library has electronically won't be retrieved without clicking on Expand My Results when searching for articles. "
• If your journal is locally held, Alma will return all the holdings (all volumes/issues) for a particular journal; it is not possible to only return the volume the article is in, so the holdings will show whether or not the article in question falls within your holdings dates.  However, there is a development issue for how the availability displays in this scenario and it is under product management review.

If you want to set your search to always show all results, you can disable the Expand My Results option so that all results, online and not online, are returned in the result set.  This can be done by unchecking the "Filter by Availability" checkbox in Discovery > Search Profiles > CentralIndex. You would repeat this for any search profile containing the CentralIndex (i.e., Primo Central).  This is described in https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Primo/Product_Documentation/020Primo_VE/022Search_Configuration/010Configuring_Search_Profiles_for_Primo_VE.

---

Nancy Babb asked:

"In the results list, materials that are checked out or in other out of library locations display the simple statement "not available"

 

Is it possible to change this label from "not available" to something else? And is it possible to vary this label based on the item status? For example, "Checked out," or "At bindery," etc.?  I think this is coming from the Calculated Availability Text Label table (code: delivery.code.unavailable) and am not too familiar with this one.

Once the record is opened/expanded, the default value within the availability section of Get It seems to be "Out of library":

Can this label also be modified, especially to reflect specific item status? I believe this is in the GetIt Tile Labels table (code ulldisplay.availabilty.unavailable)."

 

Lynn replied: "Both labels can be customized (and aligned to match if interested).  Traditionally, Primo controlled the status in the brief display and Alma controlled the status in the Get It section which is why they are distinct.

The "Not Available" label is found in Calculated Availability Text Labels and the "Out of Library" label is found in the Getit Tile Labels.  For the Calculated Availability Text Labels table, there will likely be multiple lines which need to be changed for each status.  For "Not Available" there are two:

This is true for other statuses, such as "Checked out...," "Online Access," etc.  The reason for this is that there are different delivery codes assigned by Primo depending on if the item is from Alma or Primo Central, if the item is completely unavailable (i.e., all copies checked out) or partially unavailable (i.e., checked out by your institution but available at another institution), etc.  This table covers all possibilities.  Unfortunately it's not possible to specify "At bindery" or other specific statuses as Primo interprets all of these as either checked out or unavailable."