LibGuides: Alma/Primo: Glossary

Glossary

AGGREGATOR COLLECTION: An electronic collection for which the library typically selects the entire collection of portfolios.
ALMA: The library service platform (LSP) which will replace both Sierra and Ebsco holdings management functionality.
ALMA LINK RESOLVER: Alma component that responds to external requests with a menu of physical, electronic, and digital services. For physical resources, requests are offered; for electronic resources, context-sensitive links are provided; for digital resources, direct links to the digital object are provided.
CENTRAL KNOWLEDGE BASE: The part of the Community Zone that contains linking information to electronic resources around the world.
CIRCULATION DESK: the service point within Alma for physical inventory, configured at the Library level. There can be multiple circulation desks per location, as well as multiple locations served by a circulation desk (many-to-many relationship). The functions of the Circulation Desk are: check in, check out, and reshelve.
COLLECTION (see "Electronic Collection")
COMMUNITY CATALOG: Metadata records for electronic resources stored in the Community Zone, which are updated as required by Ex Libris or by contributions from the community. An institution's electronic inventory can be linked to the current versions of these records, or can be copied to the institution and maintained locally.
COMMUNITY ZONE (CZ): Contains shared electronic bibliographic records and authority vocabularies. Resources are available for use to all Alma institutions. Alma community can update Community Zone catalog bibliographic records. Functions are parallel to those of OCLC metadata and cataloging utility (for electronic resources only).
DATABASE: In Alma, this is a specific term meaning a collection with no portfolios associated. Typically, this is an "abstract & indexing" or "citation" database, with no content available. In Primo, it will have a URL taking the user to the site.
DIRECT LINKING: Allows the user to be taken directly to the full text of online resources, rather than the item's details page when the user clicks the "Available Online" link in the search results.
DISCOVERY: The feature that allows a patron to find records and inventory from the Alma Repository. Primo is Ex Libris' system to provide discovery.
ELECTRONIC COLLECTION: A collection of electronic resources that can be one of the following types: Selective, Aggregator, or Database. Each collection type will have a "service type" of full text, selective full text, or none (for database resources with no attached portfolios). Documentation will use the term "collection" but you may still often heard it referred to as a "package."
ELECTRONIC RESOURCE: A rather general term for licensed material to which the institution subscribes. This could be a single title, database, selective package, or content aggregator. These can be activated/de-activated, and have descriptive bibliographic metadata associated with them. After activating an electronic resource for your institution, you will be able to edit the Portfolio for individual ("standalone") titles, or the Service for database/selective/aggregator collections.
EXTERNAL USER ACCOUNT: These user accounts are managed via an external database of information, that is imported either manually or on a scheduled basis. Information for a user will be updated via a matched field, or new users created and non-existent users in the file will be removed from Alma. If there is a match to an internally created user, that will be overlaid with the information from the imported file, and that user will become external.
FULFILLMENT: The process by which patrons borrow and return physical resources, or access electronic or digital resources. Includes the current services of circulation, INN-Reach and Interlibrary Loan.
FULFILLMENT UNIT: (also sometime called "Location Type") A grouping of locations of the same type (e.g. media, reserves, etc.) that follow the same loan rules. Exceptions for items within the fulfillment unit can be made using an "item policy rule." Fulfillment unit rules (similar to "loan rules" in Sierra) determine the loan policies that apply in different scenarios (e.g. different patron types). Locations grouped under a fulfillment unit do NOT have to be within the same library.
FULFILLMENT NETWORK: A group of institutions that allow directly requesting hold and digitization requests from one another. Patrons of any institution can directly place requests of any type on items of any other institution in the network. OhioLINK would be our Fulfillment Network (similar to INN-Reach in Sierra).
FUND: A fund represents money in an account. There are "summary funds" and "allocation funds." You can move funds within a ledger hierarchy so that the fund is still nested under the same ledger, but is associated with a different account within the ledger. You can also move funds from one ledger to another, as long both ledgers are in the same fiscal period, and are owned by the same organizational unit (the institution or a specific library).
INDICATION RULE: A saved rule used for creating filtered sets. They are applied to already created sets, and result in an itemized set.
INSTITUTION: The highest level of the organizational hierarchy in Alma. There is only one institution in your instance of Alma. When you log into Alma, your are logging in to your institution's instance of Alma. Libraries are the next lower level of organization, and there can be many libraries within the Institution, but there must be at least one.
INSTITUTION ZONE (IZ): The library's local inventory, including items, holdings, portfolios, orders (POs/purchase orders), payments (POLs/purchase order lines), vendor records, funds/ledgers. Bib records can be in the IZ only, or linked to the Network Zone (with some exceptions).
INVENTORY: The resources (physical, electronic, and digital) associated with a library. Represents items from Sierra and holdings in EDS.
ITEM: The inventory level of a resource for fulfillment and usage. Items may include bar codes and other identification details.
ITEM IN PLACE: The item is in place on its shelf. ("available" in Sierra)
ITEM NOT IN PLACE: The item is not on its shelf ("not available" in Sierra). It is recorded as being somewhere else (for example, on loan, in transit, or in process of acquisition) and is not placed on the shelf yet.
JOBS: Routines created to perform actions on sets of records (similar to "global update" in Sierra), or to perform global tasks with automated processes. Scheduled jobs are automatically run on a regular schedule, and don't require a set to be created in advance. They are set up during Alma implementation, and usually cannot be controlled by your institution. Workflow jobs are automatically run when a user performs a task that requires processes to be run by Alma (e.g. sending purchase orders to a vendor). These are not created manually or as a scheduled job, but do appear in the "monitor jobs" list.
LOAN RECORD: same as "checkouts" in Sierra, records of when/to whom/due date of items checked out. Associated with item inventory records.
LOCAL EXTENSIONS: Consortia members who share bibliographic records may still want to maintain some local information in their IZ record. This can be accomplished through the use of local tags, i.e. the 590 tags currently used in Sierra with local institutions' notes in the bib record. If editing a record in the Network Zone, the local extension is only visible to the institution that created that extension.
LOCATION TYPE: See Fulfillment Unit.
MANUAL JOBS: These jobs are available to run by you as required. Some manual jobs first require you to create sets (of items, users, and so forth) for the job to process.
MAPPING TABLE: An Alma feature for configuring settings for a list of items, such as customer parameters.
METADATA EDITOR (MDE): The tool for editing and creating bibliographic and holdings records in Alma.
METADATA MANAGEMENT SYSTEM ID (MMS ID): The record ID number. The MMS ID can be 8 to 19 digits long (with the first two digits referring to the record type and the last four digits referring to a unique identifier for the institution).
NETWORK ZONE (NZ): A management tool used by a collaborative network to centrally manage certain features, such as configuration tables, licenses, and records. A virtual institution (in our case OhioLINK) is used as the management interface and central repository and catalog. Bib/metadata records can be located in the NZ (with some exceptions, e.g. suppressed bib records). The NZ can include physical and electronic resources.
NORMALIZATION RULES: A set of rules that can be built and applied to bibliographic records in order to enhance the record (similar to macros that perform processes that need to be repeated many times in the same way). These rules may add fields, remove fields, or make changes to fields. The rules can be applied to an individual record (e.g. during cataloging an individual item), or to a set of records that has been created. They can also be applied to records upon importing them into either the Institution Zone or Network Zone (somewhat like a load profile in Sierra).
PORTFOLIO (ELECTRONIC PORTFOLIO): Electronic resource (inventory) that maintains the specific coverage (local or global), access controls, and link information relevant for a particular electronic title. Portfolios can be "standalone" or part of an electronic collection. A parallel in EDS holdings management would be the title details screen (though there are some differences).
PRIMO VE: Ex Libris' discovery system for patrons. A single search interface that provides a gateway to a wealth of scholarly content, including print, electronic and digital collections. Our product is Primo VE
PRIMO CENTRAL INDEX: Primo's central database. A mega-aggregation of hundreds of millions of scholarly e-resources of global and regional importance. These include journal articles, e-books, reviews, legal documents and more that are harvested from primary and secondary publishers and aggregators, and from open-access repositories.
PRIVILEGES: Permissions to perform certain actions in Alma, or to access specific pages, fields, or options in Alma. A user role is defined by the privileges that it grants the user
PO / PURCHASE ORDER: an order composed of one or more Purchase Order Line(s).
PURCHASE ORDER LINE (POL): The equivalent of "order" in Sierra. Can be one-time or recurring.
READING LIST: A list of citations for a specific course, ie. Course Reserves/Textbook Sharing.
REPOSITORY: All information that Alma has about library material, including inventory, such as physical titles and items, electronic titles, electronic collections and electronic portfolios, digital titles and representations, deposits, management collections, and authorities. The repository title record (located via an All titles, Physical titles, Electronic titles, or Digital titles search) is the bibliographic record for the title.
REPOSITORY SEARCH: Alma’s Repository Search gives the Alma staff user a single point of access to all forms of resources in a wide variety of business workflow contexts. searching across all types of material – print, electronic and digital.
REQUEST RECORD: Same as a "hold" record in Sierra.
RESOURCE SHARING: Borrowing or lending of materials (electronic or physical) between distinct institutions.
ROLE PROFILES: Sets of user roles that already defined to include scopes and parameters. These can make assigning roles to a large number of people easier.
SCHEDULED JOBS: Scheduled jobs run at predetermined intervals or dates. Many of these jobs are scheduled by Alma, and set up during implementation. For manually scheduled jobs, you can configure the schedule using predefined job scheduling options. Note that scheduled jobs run as close as possible to their scheduled time. Some jobs can run in parallel, but part or all of a job may wait until a server has available resources.
SELECTIVE COLLECTION: an electronic collection for which the library typically activates specific portfolios and not necessarily the entire collection (though it may be).
SERVICE TYPE: The linking or full text information for an electronic package or database. A service can be full text, selected full text, or no fulltext (e.g. A & I databases).
SETS: Batches of records created with queries (similar to "create lists" in Sierra). Logical sets are created with logical queries, and can be refreshed by rerunning the search. Itemized sets are batches of records specifically chosen from a search or loaded from a file on your computer) Itemized sets are created either by using "create itemized set" or by converting a logical set into an itemized one. The records in the itemized set cannot be updated except by manually adding or removing sets.
TITLE: a unit of inventory (physical or electronic) that has bibliographic metadata describing it. A physical title could have one or multiple items (usually with individual barcodes) attached. An electronic title could have one or multiple portfolios related to it.
USER: A person with an Alma user account: a staff user, an instructor, or a patron. Users can be "external" or "internal." External users' data are maintained in a database outside Alma (such as Banner/university database) and imported/updated regularly. Internal users are created from within Alma, such as a vendor representative's contact info, a walk-up guest that isn't in the system, etc. The vast majority of users are "external."
USER GROUP: These are defined at the institution and/or the library level in Alma. Examples of user groups could be "undergraduate student," "faculty," etc. These groups are used to help determine loan policies and other services available for the group.
USER RECORD TYPE: There are 3 kinds of user record types: Public, Staff, and Contact. Public users are usually patrons, or users of the library, and are typically external user accounts. Staff users are library employees, whose roles are assigned in Alma. Contact users could be vendors or other contacts with no actual permissions in Alma; they are just informational.
USER ROLE: The privileges that a user has to work on Alma, that can be assigned with library or institutional scope. A user's roles (actually, the roles' privileges) determine a user's access to certain pages, fields, options and areas on certain pages, as well as the ability to run certain jobs and processes. Similar to "permissions" in Sierra. There are 4 general categories of user roles across an Alma functional area(e.g. acquisitions): Viewer (view only), Operator (select day-to-day operations), Manager (all day-to-day operations), Administrator (can configure others' roles, but may not have access to operational abilities in that area). Users can have multiple role categories in multiple functional areas.
WORKFLOW JOBS: Workflow jobs that run automatically when they are required. For example, after submitting a purchase order, the job Export Orders (PO) Job runs to send the PO to the vendor. In some cases, you can also run or rerun these jobs at any time—for example, if the original run failed.

PRIMO VE: The discovery interface which will replace EDS (Ebsco Discovery Service). Can search across your library's physical, electronic, and digital resources. It can also be configured to search resources outside your library's holdings.
ALERT: You can save a search query, and set the search to be performed automatically. An alert notifies you if there are any new search results.
BACK OFFICE: The user interface and programs that manage the Publishing Platform.
CENTRAL DISCOVERY INDEX (CDI): a central, unified index, for scholarly and academic material worldwide. It contains over 5 billion records and many different resource types from thousands of publishers, aggregators, and repositories, including open access content. The CDI deduplicates metadata records for the same resources across different platforms so the user only sees one result with links to the different providers of the content. Libraries can choose to control what is searchable for their users beyond their library content. Alma collections and resources that are activated become part of the CDI for your institution. 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.
DEDUP: Deduplication of redundant records considered equivalent. In the search results, records that are marked as duplicates are displayed as a single record. The metadata is displayed from the first record in the results set, and the delivery related information is created from all the records in the group. (see also FRBRization)
DELIVERY RESTRICTED SCOPES: Restricted delivery scopes indicate access restrictions for online resources.
DIRECT LINKING: Allows the user to be taken directly to the full text of online resources, rather than the item's details page when the user clicks the "Available Online" link in the search results. Can also be enabled to go directly to the first database listed when there multiple options available. This is configured in Alma Fulfillment.
E-SHELF: E-shelf enables you to save search results in your Basket.
FACETS: filter options configured by the administrator that Primo users can use to exclude/include results.
FRBRization: Grouping records together in the Primo search results according to FRBR (Functional Requirement for Bibliographic Records). Brief results for FRBR records will indicate the number of related records in the group, labeled "see all versions," which can be expanded to show all the versions available. Records can only belong to one FRBR grouping at a time. (see also "dedup") Dedup and FRBR can be toggled on/off, or certain sets of records can be suppressed from the dedup/FRBR processes in Alma configuration.
FRONT END: The user interface responsible for all interactions (such as discovery and delivery) with the end-user.
RESOURCE RECOMMENDER: a feature in Primo that must be configured by the administrator. Depending on the search terms entered, Primo can recommend resources or even a librarian to contact.
SEARCH PROFILE: Groups of records in the Primo interface that meet specific conditions determined by the administrator. E.g. there could be a search profile for your whole institution, a specific library such as a Music Library, Course Reserves, Videos or another media type.

Sierra	Alma
Cataloging module	Resources module
Check-in record	Holdings record
Checkout	Loan
Circulation	Fulfillment
Circulation Notices	Letters
Create Lists	Sets
Global update	Jobs
Item	Inventory Physical (includes physical inventory (Items), electronic inventory (Portfolio), and digital inventory (Files))
Item record	Holdings record and associated item record(s)
OhioLINK institutions	Fulfillment network
OhioLINK Central Catalog	Managed in Network Zone; viewed in Primo VE with limiters
OPAC/Library Catalog	Managed in Institution Zone; viewed in Primo VE with limiters
Order	Purchase order line (POL)
Patron	User
Permissions	Privileges (assigned through Roles)
Rapid update	Jobs
Review files	Sets
Serials module	Resources module
Sierra Statistics	Analytics
Staff account	User