Discovery and Delivery of Collections in Primo
This topic describes the relationships between Primo, Primo Central, and your link resolver in order to provide discovery and delivery of full text content to end users.
For more details, refer to 03 Primo Central Index.
Related Topics:
Primo Central
Primo Central provides easy access to over a billion scholarly materials obtained from various aggregators, publishers, and open access repositories. It includes citations for journals, articles, e-books, reviews, legal documents and technical reports, conference proceedings, research datasets and more.
In case there is not enough information to generate an OpenURL, Primo Central uses the link provided by the vendor in the citation to display full text for the record. However, most of the records from Primo Central use your link resolver to deliver full text content.
Activations
The Primo Central Activation Wizard allows you to configure which collections that Primo users can discover.
Primo Central Activation Wizard
The idea is to activate collections to which your institution has subscribed. In some cases, you may subscribe to collections that do not appear in Primo Central. For those subscriptions, refer to the Alternative Coverage guide (See the coverage lists under Primo Central Content.) and activate the alternative collections to allow the associated subscriptions to be discovered in Primo.
For example, in the Alternative Coverage guide, the citations for EBSCO’s Abstracts in Social Gerontology are not directly available from EBSCO. However, Primo Central has citations for 97% of the titles in this package through different vendors. So, if you wanted to ensure that these citations were visible in Primo, you would activate the collections shown in the right column:
Alternative Collection Activation in Primo Central
Because of the size of this database, and because Primo Central has hundreds of institutions accessing it with their own unique sets of activations and holdings, the data is indexed on a weekly basis. Generally speaking, if you make changes to your Primo Central activations or the active resources in your link resolver, it can take up to 5 to 10 business days for the change to be visible in Primo.
Link Resolver (SFX, Alma UResolver, or 360 Link)
Your link resolver provides delivery to collections to which your institution has subscribed, and adds newly-activated resources to an institutional holdings file, which contains holdings information at the publication level. Primo Central harvests this holdings information once a week and uses it to determine whether publications have full text availability.
For example, if your institution does not subscribe to Gale Onefile and you activate that collection in Primo Central, only publications that have full text access from other databases will display the Full text available indicator as shown in the following table.
Full Text Availability at the Publication Level
Primo
Depending on how your search scopes are configured in the Primo Back Office, your Primo Central results may be blended with items from your local catalog. In the following example, searches have been limited to the Primo Central Index:
Primo Central Results With Full Text
By default, Primo returns only the records that have have been activated in both Primo Central and your link resolver. Users may display all activated Primo Central records by selecting the Expand My Results check box. In addition, users may refine their results by selecting the Peer-reviewed Journal link or by selecting a collection under the Collections facet.
Expand My Results Check Box
The Include Results with no full text option in the Views Wizard (Primo Home > Ongoing Configuration Wizards > Views Wizard) allows you to display all records in the initial search results. For more information, see Configuring the Primo Central Search Scope.
For each record with available full text, users may click the View Online or View It (Alma) tab to display the full text links provided by your link resolver.
Full Text Links Provided by Link Resolver