FAQs

Table of Contents:

• Community Zone Collections
• Header Menu
• Resource Recommender

Community Zone Activations

Many A&I databases are available for activation in the Community Zone, and you may activate them and unsuppress the bibliographic record to so that the records will show up in Primo. However, the default URL for the database will need to be updated so that it contains your proxy information and any necessary ids. Note that activating a database type collection will not usually provide you with any access to content within that database, unless it's a collection managed in the Central Discovery Index (CDI) like a Link in Record collection.

Primo VE Header Menu

If you already have an A-Z database list or another webpage where you list all of your databases, the easiest way to provide access to that from Primo VE is to make a link to it in your header. To do this, you'll need the Discovery Admin role so that you have the authority to manage the look of Primo for your location.

• Go to either Discovery>Display Configuration>Configure Views or the same location via Configuration.
• Once you see your view, click on the three dots to the right of it and choose Edit:
  
• Inside of the view, you'll want to look at the links that are listed and decide what you want to keep on display, what you want to hide, and what you want to add. 
  • You can hide a link by toggling the button in the Active column on or off.
  • You can change the order in which links appear by using the up/down arrows to change the order
  • Use the Add Link option to add your database A-Z list (see screenshot below)
    
• To add a link:
  
  • You can make up your own code for the code box (e.g. databaseatoz).
  • Put your URL in the URL field (e.g. https://guides.genesee.edu/databases).
  • Put whatever you want the link to be called in the Label field.
  • Save the new link. 
• Your link will now appear in the links list and you can reorder it however you'd like it to look. Here's what the links shown above look like in Primo VE:

Resource Recommender

Another way that you can make your A&I databases discoverable by name is to add them to your resource recommender. If you're familiar with EBSCO Discovery System (EDS), this is similar to Placards, where you can manually populate the search with content which you think your students might be looking for in the discovery system, like "library hours" or a library event like "photo contest."

To edit your Resource Recommender settings:

• Go to Alma Configuration>Discovery>Other>Resource Recommender:
  
   
• If you want to add a Database, click on the three dots to the right of the Database line and click edit:
  
   
• Once you're in the edit area, choose add resource:
  
   
• Here's what the add/edit resource screen looks like:
  

Notes:

• You can name the key whatever you want as long as it's all one word with no periods
• The name field is how you want the name to look as a result in Primo VE
• The description is optional
• The tags are how you think your patrons might search for this database. Separate each term with a semi-colon
• In the URL, make sure to add your proxy because Alma/Primo will not add it for you. You're adding this as a webpage
• The other fields are optional

Once you've saved the database, you can test it by doing a search with one of your pre-defined tags and if its works, this is the kind of thing you should see:

As of 2023, Ex Libris has been making updates to how Resource Recommender works. For full documentation, see Ex Libris' Resource Recommender page.