eResource Migration - Backgrounder

Owned by Danielle Emon
Last updated: Nov 12, 2021 by Liana Giovando
4 min read

Summary

The initial Alma migration process is designed to populate the Institution Zone (IZ) with records that match your electronic collections. This will allow users to search for your electronic resources in Primo VE upon Go Live. The electronic resource migration process takes advantage of Alma’sCentral KnowledgeBase (CKB) – a collection of metadata for electronic resources, maintained by Ex Libris and accessible through the Community Zone. The availability of this Community Zone metadata can eliminate the need to manually load records for most electronic resources into your Institution Zone (IZ). See the Electronic Resource Migration General for more complete information.

 

About the Community Zone and the Central KnowledgeBase (CKB)

Initial migration options – Institution Zone

Your library will be directed to use one or more of the following approaches to populate your Institution Zone (IZ) with eResource metadata. The first two options depend upon which link resolver you currently use, and are largely dependent upon the availability of metadata in the Central KnowledgeBase.

1. SFX or 360Link

SFX and 360Link are supported by the Ex Libris migration. Link resolver information is exported, processed and activated in your Institution Zone (IZ). Your instance of Alma will be populated with records from the Central KnowledgeBase. These records will be fully discoverable in Primo VE. More specific information from the Ex Libris Knowledge Base is available for 360 and Intota to Alma Migration Guide, 360 Link Resolver Activation Report and the SFX to Alma Migration Guide.

See the 360RM and Intota Migration Tutorial for more information.

2. Other link resolvers such as EDS & Full Text Finder

Other link resolvers such as EDS & Full Text Finder are not supported by the Alma migration process and require the completion of an e-Activation form – a spreadsheet that you will be asked to complete and return to Ex Libris. This spreadsheet has a number of tabs that will allow you to select full and selective packages. By uploading this spreadsheet, Ex Libris is able to populate your Institution Zone with records from the Central KnowledgeBase. These electronic records will be discoverable in Primo.

See the Link Resolver to Alma Activations Tutorial for more information.

Submitting E-Resource Activation Forms

Please upload your e-Resource Activation Form to your MFT folder and then add a comment in the Support Portal.

If you need help with MFT, see this Basecamp document or post on the Basecamp message board.

3. P2E (Physical to Electronic) – for records that are NOT in the Central KnowledgeBase (CKB)

Notes on P2E (Physical to Electronic Processing) at Migration:

A process to migrate local electronic records that are not found in Alma’s CZ/Central KnowledgeBase or are not to be migrated via the link resolver form (e.g., choices about metadata quality).

Due to Alma’s database structure, local catalogue records for these electronic resources are migrated as physical resources, then changed into electronic resources via Physical to Electronic (P2E) processing. In brief, this may involve the following steps:

  1. Ensure the links for locally catalogued eResources in your source system are active.

  2. Consistently identify/tag catalogued eResources in your source database (If not done already). You’ll be mapping these tags to locations and identifying these locations as electronic resources on the Migration Form, Location mapping tab. Also, there is a P2E section on the Questionnaire tab of the Migration Form that will ask you to specify which fields/subfields contain electronic resource linking information. The bibliographic records for these collections will be sent to Ex Libris along with the rest of your MARC records.

  3. Creation of an input file (csv format) of bib record numbers that correspond to the eResource collections that you are migrating from your source system (e.g., from MARC 001). The migration specialists will match this file to the corresponding recently imported bibliographic records in Alma to create electronic portfolios.

  4. Once migrated, Ex Libris may guide you to run a job in Alma to update your proxy prefix if changes are made to local authentication policies. Running this job in Alma will update user access via Primo.

  5. See notes below for ongoing record handling of local eResource metadata.

Find detailed P2E instructions for the Symphony colleges on the P2E Instructions page.

See the Migration of Physical to Electronic (P2E) Resources in Alma Tutorial for more information.

Ongoing record handling - Institution Zone

The availability of up-to-date eResource metadata in the Central KnowledgeBase should eliminate the need to manually update metadata for many eResource collections, but there may be some exceptions. The following factors may determine if a library decides to load eResource metadata locally on an ongoing basis:

  • absence of some collections in the Alma Community Zone Collection List (particularly select streamed video collections);

  • metadata quality for any given collection. While most are robust, there may be some collections for which the metadata is weak.

Note: If a library chooses to manage eResource metadata locally, an import profile can be created to alleviate the need for repetitive batch editing/mapping with each subsequent collection update.