Study Group Session 118: NDE Information & Consultation Session

Session Notes

NDE Information and Consultation Session

Marie Song, OCLS

PowerPoint Slides

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What is NDE?

• You can duplicate your existing view to an NDE view and that will copy over all of the configurations that will be carried over.

• There is no action required at this point, nothing will change automatically - it is a self-switch process. You get to choose when you go live with NDE and continue using your existing Primo VE view.

NDE Key Dates

• November 2025: Primo NDE view general release. Institutions can now create a Primo NDE view in both production and Sandbox environments. Going forward, when creating a view, the NDE will be the default - there’s an NDE checkbox that will be automatically selected. You can still create a Primo VE view by deselecting that box. You can also duplicate an existing view for NDE and work with it alongside your existing Primo VE view - this doesn’t mean that you’re going live with NDE, just allows you to work with both views. However, once you create a view for NDE, you can switch to live for it and it is difficult to roll this back, so just be careful about that.

• Ex Libris will continue releasing new NDE features as part of their monthly releases

• May 2026 new release: customize homepage in Alma feature will be released - it will only be necessary to use customization package for broader ranging modifications. This might be of interest and affect your timeline for migration planning.

• January 2028: Ex Libris will no longer support Primo VE UI

• Summer 2026 or Summer 2027 potential migration dates

Mixpanel

• Switching to Mixpanel is a separate process from going live with an NDE view - a couple of other steps are required to go live with Mixpanel

Rebecca Pearson, Lambton College: When you set it up, you have to choose whether you set it up as an institution or a member of a network and if you decide to switch later, you'll lose data.

Marie: Yes, colleges in the networked environment will need to make a decision about the Mixpanel structure. Consortia need to choose between 2 data structures.

OCLS Support

• OCLS will coordinate mixpanel decision and sharing information about that

• NDE Testing and Troubleshooting Volunteer Team: small group of college library staff and OCLS who will do some testing on NDE, provide recommendations, create documentation, and provide troubleshooting support for the larger group and share resources

• OCLS wants to make sure that we’re providing the right kind of support and it would be great to get your feedback on the migration program (collective or cohort, a common live date, regular check in schedule) and a central customization package

Decisions

• Transition Timeline: This will depend on your institution’s workflows, staff capacity, etc.

• Coordinated Migration Program: This would mean working together, more collaborative and structured migration process than individual migrations. The decision would be informed by each college’s transition timeline, processes, other dependencies and whether the target go live dates are aligned.

• Mixpanel structure: This is a decision only for colleges in the networked environment.

• Central customization package: This is also a decision that is primarily for colleges in the networked environment. This would involve making a decision on whether this would beneficial and what that package would look like.

Next Steps

• Following the meeting, a survey will be sent out to the Page 1+ Primary Contacts to gather information about about your pre-moving customizations, the work that you’ll be looking to do at your college, and your timeline preferences. This will not lock you into anything, but the information will be helpful for informing group transition planning and OCLS support.

• OCLS will host another college consultation in January where we’ll provide updates, new information that we’ve learned, and more concrete plans and next steps

Resources

• Reach out to OCLS Help Desk with questions or updates about NDE at your institution, decisions that you’re making or things that are happening

Discussion

URL redirects

Rebecca: We have the friendly URL set up to go to specific view and that view is based on a code and while you’re testing it, you can’t reuse that code and i don’t think you can edit it later. Has there been any information about what work needs to be done to get the friendly URL to point to the correct view later? Otherwise, it sounds like the friendly URL is a redirect to what the URL actually is and then if you set up an NDE view to be replacement to that view, it would be a second redirect.

Marie: Ex Libris has said that there will be redirects in place for existing URLs, but you make a good point about the view code. We’ll look into this and share the answer.

Search algorithm

Danielle Emon, OCLS: I’m assuming NDE will bring no changes to underlying algorithm (weighting for access points) for search and display?

Marie: That would be my assumption as well, but we will take this back to Ex Libris too and confirm.

DEI Rules

Danielle: Will the configured DEI rules continue to exist?

Marie: I would assume so - that sounds like a configuration thing that Ex Libris has said you can just copy over and it will stay the same. A lot of the changes coming are to customization of the look and feel/design changes rather than configurations. We can get confirmation on this.

Danielle: DEI rules - you mentioned that discovery related data managed in Alma was carried over but the route for configuring DEI rules is a bit different so that’s why I asked

Aimee Jeffrey, Conestoga College: They are configured in separate places Danielle. Think of the NDE as design changes. 

Thoughts on what your college is thinking about for the transition? Integrations that you want to make sure are available before you make the switch?

Marie

Aimee: We may take this opportunity to think bigger picture and make changes that we've never had time for. I'd love to do some UX testing for this. HA!  

• Marie: This could be a good time for other discovery related topics that you are interested in, we could have Study Group sessions on them

• Diana Borges, OCLS: There has been interest in a session on search configurations, so we are looking at scheduling that in the next series. if there are any other sessions you would interested in, please email me or the OCLS Help Desk or add them to a registration form.

Any general questions, things that were not discussed in the slides?

Marie

Travis Winwood, Algonquin College: Does ExLibris happen to have a list of those who have gone live? It would be nice to see what folks are doing.

Marie: I don’t think they have a public list but we can do some digging around, and provide examples of institutions that have gone live so you can see what it would look and feel like.

Dana O’Hagan, Niagara College: Some of the Canadian universities have switched over

Marie: If you have examples, feel free to share them and we will include them in the notes for the Study Group sessions

Jennifer Horwath, Mohawk College: In case folks haven't seen it yet, U of T has gone live with NDE: https://library.utoronto.ca/

Timeline for switch?

Marie

Aimee: I'm meeting with our IL team later this month to get their feedback. 

Rebecca: Early May or late August. Year depends on if we are ready

Travis: Hopefully Spring/Summer 2026.

Dana: Same here.

Sarah Walker, Confederation College: Summer 2026 hopefully

Louis Lacelle, La Cite College: We don't have to go live all at once right?

• Marie: No, that’s a decision that colleges can make.

Michelle Johnson, Centennial College: No idea - taking over this portfolio and getting to grips with the scope

Sarah Wiebe, George Brown College: I have to review our current customizations, switching date will be determined after that

Lisa Di Barbora, Humber College: We plan to switch this spring to give librarians the time to update documentation. In May.

Issues with Search Results

Nicole Maddock, Georgian College

• We are seeing some wild search results lately, in the last month.

• We have been testing whether we want to toggle the search for all institutions, instead of just keeping it to what is in the institution.

• When testing the same search, getting completely different results when toggled to search all vs just Georgian.

• Also seeing a very big lag in whether an item is available at all. If defaulted to search all materials, not just Georgian - from search results, a title we own will display as not available, but if you click into the record, you see it is available online and the database its linking to. Then when you go back to the search results, it says it is available online. But when you return to the original results, its not showing that we own as owned.

• So we’re seeing a lot of different things - when we’re searching just Georgian items, we’re getting very different search results even though the search strategy is the same and when we’re toggled to search everything, we are getting weird behaviour between the results and showing what we own.

Sarah Wiebe

• We’re seeing some weird results too, librarians have contacted me to see if the algorithm has changed. We’re seeing weird issues with filters and the relevancy of results - the results at the top are not the ones that they expect, are not relevant/what used to show up before.

Nicole:

• We’re seeing the same kinds of issues with relevancy also. We’ll do the same search and in one person’s search the relevant item will be item 9 and on the other person’s search, it will be on page 9.

• I guess the next question is is it something we’ve done?

Sarah Wiebe:

• I haven’t changed anything so I have to assume it’s on the Ex Libris side.

• Going through all the settings to see if everything is the same.

Nicole:

• Everything looks the same to me in the back end.

Travis:

• We’ve also had interesting things going on, but I hadn’t been able to narrow down what the problems were.

Rebecca:

• I know someone at Lambton couldn't find an Elsevier result at all. We owned it, but it didn't even show up when we expanded the results beyond full text.

  • Aimee: You can find it in your Alma portfolios, but it doesn't populate Primo VE?

  • Rebecca: They didn't try Alma. Only Primo and I don't have the title.

Travis:

• Interesting! We've had patrons place RS request on items owned - an option that should not be available and I can't replicate.

  • Aimee: I wonder if they submitted through the blank form? 

  • Travis: I don't think so. At least by how the request info was populated. The only other blank form that could is emailed in.

  • Aimee: Travis Winwood this may be obvious, but did you confirm your Display logic rule didn't get deactivated? 

  • Travis: Not purposely. But I have noted that they sometimes get dropped if patrons link in through the recommender. So it's possible!

  • Aimee:  I've had things randomly deactivate without my intervention

  • Travis: I'm somewhat glad its not just me! The randomness does make this frustrating!

Terri Duff, Fleming College: Did you add the new Available on Shelf facet?

Sarah Wiebe and Nicole: No

Marie: have you opened Ex Libris tickets about these issues?

Nicole and Sarah: Not yet, checking configurations first

Marie: If you open a ticket, this could be a good one to bring up the next Ex Libris Quarterly Support Meeting

Stacey Boileau, OCLS:

• The next meeting is at 10:30 am on Dec 5, 2025

• OCLS encourages colleges to attend

• Let Stacey (sboileau@ocls.ca) know by the end of this Friday if you would like to attend and/or the ticket numbers you would like to be raised at the meeting

Issues saving records from MDE

Dana O’Hagan, Niagara College

• Staff at Niagara are currently experiencing issues while cataloguing, cleaning up records for NZ/IZ linking. They reported seeing error messages while trying to save bib records. Errors "not able to save draft" and "error saving" are showing while staff are trying to save changes to their bib records in Alma.

• Are any other Colleges experiencing this issues?

Rebecca: have experienced issues in the past, but they didn’t last long/were sporadic

Alyssa Kuehner, Fanshawe College: I was getting an error message this morning, not sure if it was the same, it was not persistent

Dana: will continue to monitor to see if it’s a persistent message throughout the day

Issues with Alma D Collections

Kathleen Lidsay, Georgian College

• I added around 20 items to Alma D, with attachments, and then once I did, everything gone out of my collection. They are in Alma but gone in the online view. The issue seems to be only with subcollections, because wen I move the items to the main collection, they show up but when I move them back to the sub-collection, they don’t.

Rebecca: Is there a suppressed icon on the subcollection?

• Kathleen: No, I suppressed and unsuppressed it. I also made a new sub-collection and move everything there but it still won’t show up. It only shows up when I move them all into the main collection.

Aimee: sometimes it takes a full day for me if I add something new to a collection.

Kathleen: I did some testing with co-workers and they couldn’t see the items either. Will give it a couple more days and see whether it is still going on.

Aimee: I wonder if it needs to recalculate something.

Transition to Specto and NDE

Travis

• On Collections, Did I hear correctly that the transition to SPECTO is based on going live with NDE?

Stacey:

• Only the discovery features are dependent on going live with NDE, but the rest of the Specto features will start to be released this May

• Specto NDE features  dependency Adding subcollection searching along with facet filtering (NDE)*

  • Expanded full-text indexing and display (NDE)*

• It’s not a proper migration, more of a release of functionality and an opt in model, where it will be released and you can opt in or opt out, then eventually it will become the default.

Resource Sharing Update

Diana

• Reminder that the next All Colleges Page 1+ Resource Sharing Check-In will be on Dec. 2 at 11am. This will be an opportunity to gather and discuss the status and impacts of resource sharing among Ontario colleges using Alma and Primo VE as well as share some updates on configurations and ongoing projects. All colleges are encouraged to attend, including those outside of the networked environment. Please share widely with anyone you think might like to attend.

Next Session

• Dec 3, 2025at 11 a.m. - 12 p.m.: Claudia Balby from Ex Libris will present on Benchmark Analytics in Alma. This will be another hour long session. We will send a reminder for colleges to submit their questions for Claudia in the Sign-Up Sheet closer to the date.

• Sign up sheet for questions/knowledge share topics is now available: https://clo-collaboration-spaces.atlassian.net/wiki/x/BgDfg

• To register for Study Group click here. A meeting series invitation will be sent to your inbox. Join us on MS teams. If you already have the series in your calendar, no action is needed!

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Transcript

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