Discovery Primo VE Committee: August 20, 2025

Members attending: [First Name Last Name (Institution)]

• Andrew Belongea       2024-2027       Columbia College Chicago
• Allan Berry                  2024-2027       Loyola University Chicago
• Margaret Heller           2024-2027       DePaul University
• Thom Jencks              2024-2026       North Central College
• Sara Rizzo                  2025-2028       National Louis University
• Pete Steadman           2025-2026       Illinois Wesleyan University
• Cassie Wagner           2025-2028       Southern Illinois University Carbondale FY26 Chair

Members absent: Tammie Busch - Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Colin Koteles - College of DuPage

Staff attending: Jessica Gibson - CARLI, Annie Serrano - CARLI

Taking Today’s Minutes: Pete Steadman

Announcements

• Introductions
• Review Committee Charge
• Review highlights from CARLI Committee Guidelines
• Review Committee past annual reports

Discussions

•  Possible FY26 work:
  • FRBR/Dedup
    • CARLI has received examples from member libraries
    • Some comments from other Alma customers on email list
    • Research work at other consortia/libraries
  • Local Fields
    • Have not received additional requests for new fields
    • Will put out a call for suggestions later in 2025.
  • Research Assistant and Document Insights developments
    • Recent post to Primo customer email list about Microsoft Azure OpenAI that underlies the Assistant has “guardrails” on results to prevent results that are “offensive”.
    • Committee will work on an announcement to member libraries to raise awareness and summarize the issue.
  • Next Discovery Experience (NDE)
    • Committee members with early access provided a brief demo. The NDE is also available in the DPU Sandbox.
    • There are many exciting improvements, but NDE will not have full consortial functionality until at least November 2025.
    • All JavaScript customizations will need to be rewritten due to new version of Angular.
      • Springshare chat widget does not work “as is”
      • CARLI supports a small number of customizations that will need to be reevaluated and possibly rewritten.
    • All libraries will receive NDE access in November 2025 but should wait to implement until summer 2026 at earliest.
  • Discussion of Research Assistant analytics. Will wait to see how change to Mixpanel with NDE affects analytics.
  • Consider Primo customizations webinar/lighting rounds for common NDE customizations. Ex Libris has already created a lot of content that we can direct CARLI libraries to and walk them through.
• Opportunity for the Committee to give a table talk at the CARLI Annual Meeting on Oct. 22, 2025. We will submit a table talk on change management in light of the upcoming switch to NDE for library discovery.
• Review of past Potential Topics lists and webinar survey forms
  • Indication rules in Alma
  • User Interface design
  • Usability testing refresher
  • Alma/Primo VE Collections
• “Exact title search by Title or Title:Subtitle” is a new option in the August 2025 release. It must be set for the entire network. The Committee would like to test this in the Sandboxes before making a recommendation.

Decisions

• Minutes of the July 29, 2025 meeting were approved.

Tasks assigned

• Email will be sent in future to ask for any more suggestions for new consortial local fields.
• Cassie will draft and Committee will review announcement about Research Assistant “guardrails”. CARLI will send to appropriate email lists.
• Allan volunteered to pull together NDE documentation list cheat sheet.
• CARLI staff will submit the Committee’s table talk topic.
• CARLI staff will request that Ex Libris enable the “Exact title search by Title or Title:Subtitle” option in the Sandboxes.

Meeting Dates and Deadlines

• Next meeting Sept. 17, 2025, 10am-noon.