From Digital Commons to Alma/Primo: A Systems Interoperability Project

Background: In 2018 our library migrated to Ex Libris’s Alma and its discovery service Primo. Alma allows content from OAI-PMH compliant archives to be loaded to Primo for discovery. Our library has a Digital Commons institutional repository (IR) system and librarians were eager to explore including IR content in Primo. Post-migration a feed was established between the IR and Primo, but there were issues with adding all IR content and the feed was removed. Consequently, we wanted to explore alternatives that would allow for the integration of more selective IR content.

Description: For our pilot project, we explored the possibility of integrating a single Digital Commons collection into Alma and Primo. Our Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) projects collection was well suited to this project because the majority of items are full-text and unpublished elsewhere. We identified two potential import profiles in Alma that would integrate content--the Discovery Import Profile which allowed loading of Dublin Core or MARC 21 bibliographic records directly into the Primo Central Discovery Index and the Repository type Import Profile which allowed bulk loading of bibliographic records directly into Alma. To improve management of metadata and maintenance we selected the Repository type Import profile and mapped IR content to the MARC 21 format. Using an XLSX file, we successfully added 89 DNP project records to Alma, making them available in Primo for direct discovery.

Conclusion: What are the benefits of integrating OA content from an IR into a library catalog or discovery service? In the fall of 2021 we began tracking collection downloads from our IR as well as Alma OpenURL requests and Primo access requests. Going forward we plan to continue to track these figures. We believe that avenues for readership for the DNP collection can be enhanced through inclusion in the library catalog and that broader access to these practice projects could in turn enable quality healthcare improvements. In the future, we plan to integrate additional IR collections using the methodology established during the pilot phase of our collection level IR to Alma/Primo integration.