Hello and welcome to the March 2024 Alma Primo VE office hours.
Ted Schwitzner and I, Marisa Tolbert, will be your co-hosts for today's session.
And let me just jump on video here for a minute because I know there are several of you who do not know me or are not familiar.
So hello, I'm Marisa.
I'm going to shut my video off for the rest of the presentation.
The structure for this month's office hours is slightly different from what you are accustomed to.
If you direct your attention to the third paragraph in blue text on the screen that reads, your questions will be answered during the presentation.
To ask a question or comment, use the chat.
If you'd like to get on the microphone, use the raise hand reaction, and we will ask you to unmute.
So for a second here, let's all practice this.
locate the reaction button on the bottom of your screen and click it.
Then select raise hand.
Awesome.
I am hearing a bunch of pinging type noises.
They're like, like a ping pong ball.
It looks like everyone's got the hang of it.
So to lower your hand, you will go back to that button, the reaction button, and click lower hand.
Thanks, everybody.
This is a deviation from the standard procedure during office hours where we save Q&A or questions and answers until the very end.
My colleague Ted Schwitzner and I are running this as a discussion because we have three sets to cover.
and we understand there may be a lot of questions along the way.
Please do interact with us throughout the presentation.
Myself, Ted, and the CARLI staff that are on this call will answer your questions.
And if we don't have the answer during this session, we will share with you means to follow up when we get that answer.
In today's office hours, we are covering back to P2E cleanup.
You may recognize images from pop culture movies and TV shows that are about time travel.
This is intentional as we will be traveling back in time together, focused on the P2E process and recommended cleanup from migration to your current Alma and Primo VE environments.
Rest assured, we will not be traveling at light speed.
But first,
Let's look at today's agenda.
We will be sharing upcoming events and announcements.
Then we will dive into overview, history, context, and a discussion of P2ESET in your Alma institution zones, also known as IZs.
Here are a few Carly calendar events listed.
You can also access the Carly calendar from the link being provided in chat.
This month, there is an EBSCO Experience Manager webinar on the new EBSCO host interface and the EBSCO admin module.
Every Wednesday this month are the weekly OER grants office hours.
There are four upcoming Professional Development Alliance events, also known as PDA, with one occurring tomorrow.
And there is an information section on the shared serial storage from West.
We have one announcement.
Registration for the Ex Libris users of North America or eLuna Annual Conference and related events are now live.
You can register at the link in the chat.
All right, now we will get into our DeLorean time machine and go back to the future and to PTE overview.
Right now, you might be asking yourself, what is P2E?
If you were not around at the time of your library's migration from Voyager or your former ILS, or if you were working in your library at the time of migration, you might be asking yourself, what was P2E?
P2E is an acronym.
for physical to electronic and is the process where you or someone at your library supplied ex libris with a file containing bibliographic IDs for items in your library that were records for physical items being transformed to records for electronic items once in Alma.
More about these records will be discussed shortly.
You may be also asking yourself,
What is there to clean up and why?
Currently, each ID has one to three sets.
These sets in Alma are bibs with no inventory, physical items with an ER location, and electronic portfolio standalones.
We will be describing the types of records found in these sets in a moment and why you will want to review and clean them up.
You may also be asking yourself,
What are the sets in my ID and why?
Each ID is going to be different as to which of these sets is there and how many records are in each.
Some of this has to do with procedures your library has when dealing with these types of records.
Some of it may have to do with turnover and information getting lost in the process.
And some of it may have to do with this cleanup work being lower in priority.
Whatever the reason, we are here to help guide you.
Give me just a second, I'm gonna take a drink of water.
All right, I'm back.
Our first set to discuss is Bibs with No Inventory.
Here we have the scene from Princess Bride where the grandfather is reading the story to his grandson.
Like the grandfather is trying to preserve the story and art of storytelling, this set is also about preservation in libraries and the applicable procedures with relation to bound widths, which Ted will be discussing shortly.
First, I will cover a few scenarios that could have resulted in bibs with no inventory post P2E.
In the first scenario, at the time of migration in P2E,
The library had only bib records for their e-resources in the catalog because having an 856 field and the bib were thought to be sufficient.
These records would still be present if the library did not include bib record IDs for these bib-only records in their P2E file.
In the second scenario, the library had a bib record for an e-item reserved.
Voyager had a not-so-savvy way of hosting URLs for e-items.
If these records were present and were not listed in the P2E file, the bib could be in Alma with no inventory.
In the third scenario, a library may have gone through and cleaned up portfolios through deletion.
However, when doing these deletions, the librarian
might have been timid about selecting the, are you sure you want to delete this record with no other inventory?
And subsequently, the library is left with a bib that has no inventory.
Additionally, your library could have cleaned up portfolios and or deleted those with CZ or NZ bibs.
Bibs from the CZ and NZ can be sticky in the IZ.
And it is possible that there are some orphan bibs hanging around from this.
If a sticky CZ or NZ bib is the case, these can be copied to catalog and deleted.
Or you can delete these by a job.
Before TEG goes into bound widths, are there any questions?
Not seeing chat activity, not hearing anyone raise their hand or get on the mic.
So, Ted, take it away.
Sure.
Thanks, Marisa.
So, bound widths are a fourth category that is related to the reason that bound widths might exist in your catalog.
What you see on the screen right now, in fact, is what is called a host bibliographic record that represents several titles that were bound together in the previous system, which in this example would have been a Voyager database.
Voyager and other ILSs sometimes have techniques for allowing a single item or a single holding to be represented collectively
and linked to multiple bibliographic records at the same time.
Alma does not have that same functionality.
Instead, it requires a single bib to a single holding and to one or more items from there.
Instead, Alma relies on the use of relational mark tags, such as 773 or 774, to relate records back and forth to each other.
During migration, the migration process looked for and found any hit situations where records were using multiple bibs together to a single holding or to a single item and split those back up so that the inventory was related to one of these host bibliographic records.
That would have left the original bib records that describe the actual titles and contents standing alone without any direct inventory relationship.
But you'll frequently see these and run across them in your institution zones when you search for a title and you look under the inventory section and you see related titles.
One of the ways to identify situations where there are bibs with no inventory are to look specifically for these host bibliographic records.
These records should tell you that those records exist in the first place, and you can then use that information to clean up and identify the records as things that you should keep, or at least keep track of for the short term.
Let's talk about the host bibliographic records further.
Host bibliographic records have a 245 title field, beginning with the words host bibliographic record for Boundwith.
These words are then followed by either Muffhead or item barcode, and then finally a number, such as a holding ID or a barcode number.
Then within each host record, you'll find two or more 774 fields.
These fields indicate the constituent parts of the whole item represented by the host record.
Each 774 contains the title and the MMS ID for another record.
You can then use these data points to compare back and forth with the records that are found in the BIBS with no inventory set.
One of the things you can then do with that information is edit the bib that has no inventory and add data such as a 773 note that points back to the host bib record here so that it's easier to spot in the future that this record is part of a bound with.
You may also choose to add
additional notes like 501 or 591 notes that could be represented in public display.
And you can create reports for the future as well.
Now, if looking at individual records isn't your thing, you may also use the analysis named BIBs with 774 data, bound widths, and host BIB records.
This report should be available from shared folders Carly Network Resource Management folder when you're in the analytics and it will provide the same title and record ID as the host records.
You may even find it useful to process this report in another tool like OpenRefine in order to have a clean list of titles and MMS IDs that may be compared to the set.
One could even take the list of the 774 subfield W MMS IDs and create another bibliographic record set.
Again, once you have found these records, you'll want to make it easier to find them again and understand why those records exist.
I mentioned one of the options for dealing with bound widths here is to add notes to the record, to the BIBs that have no inventory, so that when you look at them again, you'll understand why the records are here.
However, there are additional options for resolving bound widths that we won't be discussing specifically in slides today.
But we do have a website, a webpage that is dedicated to going through additional examples that you'll want to examine and deal with.
And we will have opportunities to talk about these again in the future as well.
In fact, the last time we spoke about bound widths was an office hour section back in May of 2021.
You may want to review that session to learn more about the techniques for dealing with it.
And for more details on the Boundwith Practices as we understand them so far, you may check the Boundwith Practices webpage.
Are there any questions before we proceed back to more P2E?
Ted, there's a question in chat from Ruth.
Ruth, would you like me to read it or do you want to turn your mic on and say it yourself?
Okay, I will read it.
So I'm looking at my no holdings set and I see that two of them are records for titles we bought for Carly from the Wiley list.
I think these were created as a way to manage the purchase in acquisitions.
Is it okay to delete these?
So Danville Area Community College has records that were used to purchase titles on behalf of all of Carly, but do not have holdings or portfolios.
Yes, that's an excellent question.
And yes, it should be OK to delete those.
If you're using acquisitions, purchase order lines may actually be disconnected from bib records.
Bib records can be deleted and the PO line will retain the information about the bib that it was ordered against.
So, you'll still have a record of what you ordered and what you paid for without having to maintain a bib that's standing alone.
The other way that you can verify that though is that if you are looking at bibs with no inventory, on the results screen, you should see a link for the number of orders that are associated.
If you're not seeing any orders listed, then they're not associated with PO lines at all, and in that case, it's definitely okay to leave those.
All right.
Back to you, Marisa.
And Ruth said thank you.
All right.
Just want to check in.
How's everyone doing so far?
If you feel like sharing or feel so inclined, you can use the chat to type or select like a thumbs up emoji just to let us know that so far so good.
And if no one feels like sharing, that's okay too.
All right.
Not seeing or hearing anything that's worrisome, I will continue.
In this next set, we will discuss physical titles with ER location.
ER stands for electronic resource.
Please note that this set is only applicable to the libraries that migrated from Voyager to Alma in 2020.
So if you are a library that migrated post-2020 from a different ILS, you can set this one out.
You will not find this set in your Alma.
On this slide, you will see an image from the show Lovecraft Country
where Hippolyta is attempting to figure out Hiram's orrery, which holds the key to the time machine.
Remembering how we cataloged items in Voyager is the key to opening our memories on how this differs in Alma.
When we went from Voyager to Alma, there were some records that contained a print format and an electronic format on the same record.
Your library may have created a unique location called eReview,
migration eReview, or something similar to group these records together for later review and cleanup.
This group may also contain an 856 field or another field with a URL to the content the record was describing.
Cleaning these up will help reduce dead links, clutter in your ID, and help make collection description analytics more accurate.
Ted, did you have anything further to say to that?
I think I would mainly point out that this is similar to the example you shared earlier where a library might have had a bib record only with an 856.
It's certainly possible that the holding record that had an 856 wasn't listed on the report that identified which records should be converted to have portfolios.
But it is also possible that there could have been errors or problems in the URL that prevented a conversion, but still left the bibliographic record in place along with its original holding record.
So as a result, these records tend to look like their actual physical titles when you search for them instead of electronic titles.
Because they do, in fact, have a holding record.
If you run reports or use the set that Marisa has generated to find these, you'll want to identify whether these are resources you still have access to.
And if so, create the portfolio or activate a portfolio in a CZ collection.
And then, if possible, delete the holding record and bib record as you go.
All right.
With that, we'll continue to the next set.
In this third and final set, we are discussing electronic portfolio standalones.
The character Meg from the movie A Wrinkle in Time is pictured here while traveling through multi-dimensions.
There are also multiple dimensions or reasons as to why your IZ has electronic portfolio standalones.
These standalone portfolios may reflect portfolios you already have active in an electronic collection or portfolios that need to be linked to an already active electronic collection.
So checking for duplication is good housekeeping for reducing clutter in your IZ and multiple links showing.
These standalones may also reflect portfolios for entitlements you had in the past, but have since canceled or lost access to that potentially will lead to dead links in Primo VE.
The standalone portfolios may also represent government documents.
If your library is a government document repository,
You have probably noticed that community zone or CZ collection for government documents is unreliable and messy.
Many of your libraries may have a higher count in this set due to having to catalog your own individual gov docs to account for what you and your patrons have access to.
Ted had a little bit more to say about government documents, but before he does, are there any questions or comments?
All right.
I'm not seeing anything in chat or hearing anything, so go ahead, Ted.
Oh, wait.
We do have something in the chat.
So Gloria says, we did some cleanup after migration.
How do we find any remaining bibs without inventory that are not necessarily bound widths?
Did I miss that?
Would it be good to stop sharing here and do a demo in the sandbox?
I think that would be excellent.
All right, let's do that.
if I can get my computer to behave, which it's not.
So one moment, please.
All right, here we go.
Thank you all for your patience while I get this queued up.
Okay, can everybody see the DePaul sandbox?
It's clear here.
Great.
All right, and this is with regard to bibs with no inventory.
So, when I was going through each Alma IZ and creating these sets, I was doing the bibs with no inventory.
This is how I was
conducting this, using the search bar up here, selecting all titles, and then clicking this magnifying glass with the plus sign to the left.
And then in this pull down menu where it says, well, it did say accompanying material, scrolling down a bit, pardon my scroll, everybody, where it says has inventory, selecting that, and then equals no.
Click search.
And as you can see in the sandbox here, it is showing results.
There are 1,176 in the sandbox.
And then next I would click save and filter carry and give it a name.
And you can see that it's saved my information.
So I would name it bibs with no inventory and then save.
So once you do that, you're probably wondering, OK, that's great to learn how it was created.
But how do I go in and see that myself?
So you go to the admin here, click on Manage Sets.
And this might look a little bit different.
for you, I think, because it's being done from the network zone in your IZ, or I'm sorry, with my network zone login, there might be an extra step for you to have to get to this manage sets part where it shows the sets that I've created.
So, biz with no inventory, and if you want to click on and see what's in this set, you would click the content button,
And there, again, it shows you everything that's in the set.
And if you want to export and look at it via Excel, just click this dog-eared page with the arrow coming out of it, this little icon here, and click Excel current view or all fields.
I see there's more in the chat, but Gloria, did that help answer your question?
Gloria said yes.
And just to add in that not everybody will have the ability to see sets.
There are specific roles that make sets available and not.
But any role that can perform a repository search can save and create sets.
But to manage sets,
There are specific users and roles that result to specific types of sets.
More information on sets is available from the Ex Libris document repository.
There was a similar question.
Is there a good way to find electronic standalones?
And I can demonstrate that, or I can talk you through the steps, Marisa.
I can show what I did to create that set if it is in your institution zone.
Sure.
Go ahead.
OK.
All right.
So for the electronic portfolio standalone set,
It started with, again, this basic persistent search bar up here.
And from where it says All Titles, click the pull-down menu and select Electronic Portfolios.
And then again, you're going to click this Advanced Search icon, which is the plus sign with the magnifying glass to the left here.
And from the Accompanying Material pull-down menu, or where it says Accompanying Material,
Go down here to where it says electronic portfolio.
Click the arrow and from here.
There is this option.
Once you scroll a little bit, it says is standalone.
Select that equals and then it defaults to no.
So you need to change this to yes and click search.
And
You know, here there are results in the sandbox 26,561.
And you can see just the basic information about them from these rows.
Does that help answer the electronic portfolio standalone question?
Yes.
OK.
Does anyone you know what?
Since I'm on a roll here, I'll go ahead and do the physical titles with ER location set.
Just to cover our bases.
So when I was creating that set.
Or starting that set, because again, not every institution zone has all of these sets.
And the numbers of records in the sets are going to differ.
But for the physical titles with ER location, again, going back to this persistent search bar where I currently have electronic portfolio selected, click the pull down.
And from here, select physical titles.
And then to the left, using the advanced search icon, the plus sign with magnifying glass,
and where it says accompanying material, clicking the pull down for that.
And then selecting physical item.
So clicking on this arrow here and scroll just a little bit to where it says current location.
And then equals.
So this one was a little trickier for me.
And if you find that
This set for your library is incorrect or maybe doesn't look the way you expected.
That might possibly be because of what I selected from this location.
So some libraries have one or two locations listed here.
As you can see, the DePaul sandbox, I should say, has more than five.
I was going through and checking each of these locations for anything that said ER or migration eReview or eReview or anything that I thought had to do with electronic resources.
So just doing a kind of quick skim of these, you can see that so far there's nothing in these locations.
So when I looked at this earlier, I'm just going to jump ahead.
In Wren Law Library, there's a location called Law Electronic Review After Migration.
The code is LEReview.
So I'll say search.
And as you can see, even though there was an electronic review location, there were zero results for that.
So yay for the DePaul sandbox.
Act like it's the actual DePaul.
on the instance, but they don't have any results for this, so they're good.
And that's going to be the case for some libraries on this call, that you will not have results for that set.
I don't think I've seen anything else in chat.
Denise or Ted, have we covered everything so far?
We seem to be caught up.
All right.
Let me stop demoing and return to the slideshow.
All right.
Back to Meg with a wrinkle in time.
And I think we were in the process of, Ted, did you have a little bit more about government documents to say here?
Well, the interesting thing to keep in mind with government documents portfolios is that you would be looking for the portfolios standing alone that were added to your institution zone only.
You may find a lot of government documents turn up in a search of your zone if you're checking the network zone tab or checking
a combined search on institution and network zone titles because CARLI does share a community zone collection with government documents to every institution.
We're also, we have been working on ways to take advantage of sharing the government documents records that are in the
20 or 30 some government depository libraries that are also part of iShare, as there are a lot of those resources that are duplicated across institutions, but government documents are of course available for every institution.
So we're trying our best to make sure those resources are visible and shared when possible.
So it
becomes important to make sure you check your scope.
These could be records that you are, you know, at a point in time in the past decided this was important for us to highlight for our institution, our patrons, and may still be just left as a standalone when in fact it now duplicates offerings from the network and other institutions.
Well, we have made it through all three sets while giving an overview, history, and context of each.
We've had discussion of the P2E process and its implications one to four years since your migration to Alma and Primo VE.
We have learned some things in that time and hope that from today's session, you are better prepared to tackle these sets in your Alma IZ.
An email will be getting sent out to the iShare liaisons, tech services interest group, and eResource contacts about what was covered in today's office hours.
So if you have colleagues that could not attend today, but this is work they are responsible for, there is a forthcoming email as well as a recording of this session.
Before wrapping up, we want to share a couple links to Carly's documentation pages.
and ask if there are any last questions or comments for this discussion.
I should say, as always, if questions or concerns about the content shared here come up after the fact, you can always email the support at carly.illinois.edu email address.
I'm going to go ahead and stop the recording and then if there are any more questions.