FAQs

Holdings Publishing:

Alma publishes your electronic holdings to Primo through a publishing profile (Resources->Publishing->Publishing Profiles) called "Publish electronic records to Central Discovery Index," which runs daily. You can see the time that it runs if you click the three dots to the right of the job.

What's being published?

There's a way that you can get access to your holdings file, as described by Ex Libris in this Knowledgebase article on The Output of the Publishing Process. In general, here's what's included in that file:

• Portfolios that you have active for full-text, such as ebooks or ejournals, including the coverage dates and embargo information
• Collection level availability if it's a link in record collection and you are either leaving the collection bib record unsuppressed or you've activated the CDI-only full-text tag for the collection

Once it's published, how does the content get searched in the full-text search?

The holdings file says to Primo, "Hey, we own this electronic content" and then Primo matches the content with the ****entire CDI universe of records****. What you have active or inactive for CDI search has NO impact on the full-text search's search records. There is no way to deactivate any package from being used for the full-text search.

The record that is used for the search could be from ANY package in the CDI universe. You might get lucky and end up with the search record that's the same as the collection that you have active in Alma, like Gale OneFile: News, but there's no guarantee that that's going to happen. CDI used a merged search record, where it clumps together all of the search records from all of the vendors for that specific article and title, but it only displays one of the clump of records. We've asked if it's smart enough to pick the best record to display/use, but that's not how it works. Also, it's possible that the merged record doesn't always display the same record each time you search for an article. Meaning, if there are 5 records included in the group of records, it's possible that the first time you search, you get record #1, but the next time you search the same thing, you get record #4. This can cause significant linking problems because record #1 might have the correct article or document id, but record #4 from a different vendor for the same article may not.

Best Practices for an accurate holdings file:

• Never use the CDI-only full-text tag for anything except collections that are link in record
• Make sure that all of your selective packages, like ebook packages where you only buy some titles, are marked on the Edit Collection, CDI tab "We subscribe to only some titles in this collection" = yes. If you don't do this, the entire collection will be published as available
• NEW as of 9/24: also mark any of your aggregator collections where Full Text Linking in CDI = Linkresolver in the same way  "We subscribe to only some titles in this collection" = yes. Ex Libris will be fixing all of these for us but keep this in mind for future activations. Ex Libris has said "It is not recommended to set the value to No for Linkresolver link type of collections because setting the value to No may result in linking failures, if the collection in CDI contains additional content that is not reflected in the object portfolio list in Alma." This is counter-intuitive since you subscribe to the whole collection, but it's best practice.

Troubleshooting:

False availability: you get a search result in your full-text scope that says it's available but when I open it and the live Alma fulfillment look-up happens, the availability changes to unavailable.

• Why does this happen? Something in your holdings publishing file is telling Primo that you own this thing.
• What can you do about it? Try to figure out where the holdings might be coming from. Unfortunately, since the merged record search record doesn't correspond to what you have active in Alma, this can be challenging. You could look up the ISSN or ISBN in the Community Zone and try to figure out which of your active collections might be publishing this content as available even though you can't find the title in your IZ. If you see any active collections on the CZ title record, make sure that those collections are marked "We subscribe to only some titles in this collection" = yes

Content missing from full-text search that should be appearing. Why does this happen?:

• Could be a timing issue - it takes 72 hours for CDI changes to go into effect so you won't see article results from activated journals until three days after the activation. Though you should be able to find the article in your expanded, non-full-text search, and if you've activated it correctly, it'll start out as unavailable but the live Alma look-up should change it to available.
• If it's a link in record collection like Films on Demand, you need to make sure that you've both activated the collection for search AND you've activated the CDI-only full text tag. It will take three days for this to take effect