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A. Alma provides specific functionality related to instructor-owned reserves. To use that functionality you do need to create a brief bib. However, if you don’t need that functionality, and the instructor-owned copy matches a title already in your collection, you can simply create a new item for an existing bib and store info about the instructor loan in a note. Please note, it is unlikely that you are creating so many of these that it is having a serious impact on our total bib count. So if you are getting value from the Alma functionality, you should keep using it. |
Q. I am a little confused as how to plan our future collection expansion? Should we consider deleting collectiond collections and let students search individual databases like our good old days? This is one way to reduce bib. Please advise.
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A. Of course the specifics of your collection expansion here are unknown. But generally, Alma/Primo is intended to represent your total collection. Primo is a discovery tool, and there has never been any discussion in our consortium of asking institutions not to use it as such. Whether librarians send students to OneSearch or to individual databases should be determined by their professional judgment of how best to meet the student’s information needs. |
Q. Why are eBooks ebooks part of bib number but journals are not?
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A. The multiple activations should be resulting in additional portfolios, not additional bib records. In other words, for any title found in an All Titles or Electronic Titles search, there should be a single bib record with multiple portfolios listed under it. If you can check that this is the case, that would be helpful. We do not have limits on the number of electronic portfolios (or item records). It is possible that multi-college institutions that use different proxy settings per-college will have special challenges with NZ-hosted e-resources. This is TBD. |
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A. You are correct: linking bibs to the NZ won’t reduce the number of bibs, and if you’re the only institution with a particular title, linking it to the NZ will actually increase the total number by 1. However, please don’t let that concern stop you from linking bibs to the NZ, since we do want bib records linked to the NZ when appropriate. Our consortial policy is that with certain exceptions, bibs should be in the NZ. Probably in most cases you will not be the only institution with the title, so you won’t be increasing the number of bibs in those cases anyway. We are really looking for cases where we can get rid of unneeded bibs. |
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