FAQs

• Collection Overview
• Required Roles
• Creating a Collection
• Adding Titles
• Deleting a Collection or Titles
• Primo Configuration
• Remediating Indexing Delays

Why create a collection? 

• Use to highlight groups of records in your system on a specific topic
• Way to manage digital inventory
• Can set it up to display your digital images from your Primo Search result or from the collection links

A collection may be created in Alma by combining bibliographic records that are related (by subject matter, for example) into one entity that itself has its own bibliographic record.

There are top-level collections and sub-level collections. Sub-level collections nest under top-level collections or other sub-level collections.

Ex Libris Documentation:

• Managing Digital Resources
• Managing Collections
• Configuring Collections Discovery for Primo VE

Roles Needed to Work with Collections

• Collection Inventory Operator – Create and edit sub-collections and move sub-collections between parent collections.
• Collection Inventory Operator Extended together with Collection Inventory Operator – Create, edit, and delete top level collections and promote a sub-collection to be a top-level collection. Create, edit, and delete sub-collection and move sub-collections between parent collections.
• Digital Inventory Operator – Add/remove titles to/from a collection and move a title between collections.

Creating a Collection:

Collections are managed in Alma via Resources -> Manage Inventory -> Manage Collections

How to Add and Edit a Top-Level Collection in Alma

1. From Resources -> Manage Inventory -> Manage Collections, click Add Top-Level Collection
2. Fill out the required fields. The Title and Name of the collection should be the same, and the Name of the collection must be unique among all top-level collections.
3. Click Save to finish and come back later, or Save and Continue to save your new collection and open the Collection Resource Editor page and add more information for the collection.
4. To Edit: Go to Resources -> Manage Inventory -> Manage Collections, Click the ellipsis next to the collection you want to work in and select Edit

How to Add Titles to a Collection:

• Click on the Titles tab in the Collections Resource Manager
• To add an individual title, click Add Title. An All Titles search opens. From your search results you may select the title(s) you want to add
• To add titles from a set, click Add Titles from Set
  • How Do I Create a Logical Set?  There was an update in the August 2023 release that will let you use logical sets to automatically add content. To set it up, create a new general collection and suppress it, then use that collection in the job settings in Configuration > Resources > General > Resources Management Jobs Configuration.
    
    Then create a new collection and choose "logical collection" in the General Information area.
  • How Do I Create an Itemized Set?
• Manage Sets screen opens
• Select the set you wish to add and click Add Set Titles
• A job will run, adding the titles to the collection
• If a title is already in the collection it will not be added again
• Click Save

Adding titles to a collection through a digital import profile:

• First, set up a remote digital repository, which will let Alma harvest content from DSpace or other external repositories
• Then, set up a digital import profile to pull data from that repository into your collection
• The benefit of creating a digital import profile instead of a discovery import profile is that you'll be able to see all of the records in your collection in Alma and manage them more easily.
• You'll also be able to pull in links to pdfs or other files, and that content can be set up to display in Primo VE using the Alma Viewer

How to Delete Titles and/or a Collection:

• Digital titles cannot be deleted directly from a collection. To delete a title or all titles from a collection
  • Create an All Titles set by searching for the collection and selecting the titles you wish to delete
  • Run the Delete Bibliographic Records job on them
• To delete a collection, click on the ellipsis next to the collection and select Delete
• *Note: you cannot delete a collection until you delete all titles in the collection.

Configuring for Discovery:

• When you are ready to make your collections searchable in Primo VE, you will activate the Collection Discovery button in the Main Menu Bar. Note that the default abbreviated URL path doesn't always work, so you may need to add a new link with the full path, such as https://suny-pot.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/collectionDiscovery?vid=01SUNY_POT:01SUNY_POT&lang=en
• For each collection, up to four images from the collection are displayed and you identify those images in the Collection under the Discovery tab for your collection
• Users can also search for collections directly using Primo VE's search box
• Customizing the display for Collection Discovery in Primo VE

Display in Primo VE:

If you want the collection to use your default colors, you need to add this code to your CSS, which will cover the search bar, newspaper search and collection search colors:

*Search Bar Wrapper color */

prm-search-bar, prm-atoz-search-bar, prm-journals-search-bar, prm-browse-search-bar, prm-tags-search-bar, .prm-primary-bg, prm-collection-gallery-header .collection-header-inner, prm-newspapers-search-bar, prm-spinner.overlay-cover.light-on-dark:after {
background-color: #d1cec4;
}

Change the #d1cec4 to whatever color you want to use.

Remediating Indexing Delays:

Collection indexing is notoriously laggy, meaning that it can take a while for newly added or deleted titles to change in the collection in Primo. To nudge it along:

• Go to the list of Discovery Collections in Alma and copy the Collection id:
  
   
• Do an All Titles advanced search and limit by Collection id contains keyword [your collection id]
  
  
  
   
• Save the results as a set:
  
   
• Run the Recalculate Local Resource Types job and pick that set:
  
  
  

That usually gets the content out there in around 15 minutes. If it's a brand new collection, you might also need to save and release the collection title bib, whose MMS ID is listed next to the Collection ID.

Thanks to Yvonne Kester for her work on this FAQ.