Alma Discovery / Primo VE

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

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

In general, content availability follows these guidelines:

• Alma physical and electronic bib records: changes should show in Primo within 15 minutes
• CDI changes: 48-72 hours
• Collection changes: may need reindexing, sometimes slow to roll out

Note that because SUNY uses an NZ, any changes to NZ-linked records or 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:

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

Ex Libris Resources:

• Configuring Course Reserves for Primo VE

Training Videos:

Ex Libris differentiates between "databases," which have no full-text content, and "electronic collections," which include electronic portfolios and full-text. The out of the box "database search" from the Primo VE header doesn't work well because of this distinction, and the Discovery Working has recommended deactivating this search and adding a link to your external A-Z database list instead, under Configure Views, Edit View, Links Menu tab.

If you would like to activate database type collections for acquisitions purposes, you may do that. It's recommended that you suppress that top-level bib record so that it doesn't appear in your Primo search, but if you would like them to show in Primo, just make sure that the collection level link is correct and uses your proxy. You could also suppress the database level bib and use Resource Recommender to call attention to databases by title.

Ex Libris Documentation:

• Resource Recommender

SLS FAQs:

You can set up collections in Alma and make them discoverable in Primo VE. This could be collections of documents, artwork, DEI titles, etc. See also the section on importing external content below.

Ex Libris Documentation:

• Configuring Collection Discovery

SLC FAQs:

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:

• Process Overview
• Configuring Import Profiles for Primo VE
• Configuring Normalization Rules for Primo VE
• Creating Normalization Processes for External Data Sources
• Testing Normalization Rules for External Data Sources
• Using the Mapping Table to Map Resource Types

SLS FAQs:

There is plenty 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: