Ex Libris Central Discovery Index

The Ex Libris Central Discovery Index

The Central Discovery Index (CDI) is a searchable database of citations collected from scholarly e-resources including journal articles, e-books, legal documents and more. They are harvested from thousands of primary and secondary commercial publishers and aggregators, and from open-access repositories. CDI is also a relational database between citations rather than just an aggregated list of abstracts or citations. This enables linking features like those between a book review and the book in question or a book chapter and the entire book. By default, CDI will try to display at the top of the results list citations where the full text is available for your users based on your local subscriptions or subscriptions that CARLI provides to members of the consortium. 

CDI has several advantages over the Primo Central Index that it is replacing, including:

• Faster updates
• Single point of activation in Alma
• EasyActive for e-collections
• Merged instead of grouped records
• More granular resource types
• Addition of contextual relationships between books and book reviews, books and book chapters, and between book chapters
• Improved infrastructure designed to improve response time and scalability

For more information, see:

CARLI's Introduction to the new Ex Libris Central Discovery Index (CDI) video (~8 mins.)

PPT slides

The Ex Libris Central Discovery Index (CDI) - An Overview

Community Zone and Central Discovery Index: Two Systems with One Goal

February 27, 2020 Office Hours

June 24, 2021 Office Hours, CDI Changes Checklist, Slides