Minutes 11/20/2020

Nancy Babb (UBuffalo)
Nancy Babb (UBuffalo)
Last updated 
SUNY Discovery Working Group meeting, 11/20/2020, 1:00 pm, via Zoom
Participants: Adam, Heidi, Holly, Jen, Jessica, Jill, Michelle, Nancy, Stephanie

Agenda: 
  • Welcome new members: Adam, Holly, Jen, & Stephanie
  • Working group officers - 
    Stephanie volunteered to serve as co-chair of the working group.
  • Review of November 2020 release and upcoming December 2020 release
    The group has been discussing the November & December releases via Basecamp. Some highlights include:
    - Color Contrast Improvements for Accessibility (November)
    Amanda alerted the Group to the impending changes in October, noting that, " Most of the changes seem to be an improvement.  I'm guessing that these changes will have very little or no impact on most SUNY libraries."  This has indeed seemed to be the case.
    - Broaden Availability Status in Brief Results (November)
    Nancy reported on her campus' pleasure in the new more granular display of Unavailable status details. Heidi noted that she had already changed the inscrutable "Unavailable" status to display instead, "Check for request options," which may  provide an even more user-friendly message than even the more detailed Unavailable status message.
    The broadened availability status is disabled by default. To enable, go to: Configuration Menu > Discovery > Other > Customer Settings and set the new broaden_availability_status parameter to "true."
    More information about revising the default labels is available in the SUNY SLC FAQ: What determines the "Available," "May be available," and "Not Available" messages in Primo VE and what can we do about it? 
    -Boost My Institution (November)
    Ex Libris has introduced a new Institution Boosting section on the Ranking Configuration page (Configuration Menu > Discovery > Search Configuration > Ranking Configuration). We hope that SUNY institutions will be able to use this setting to improve retrieval of local materials in search scopes that include both local and SUNY results, thus making a SUNY-inclusive scope more appealing and useful to more campuses.  Nancy (UBuffalo) and Amanda (Broome) are testing settings.  Nancy reported that adding Boost My Institution to factor 100 has produced good results at UBuffalo, greatly decreasing the number of non-UB records returned within top search results in SUNY-inclusive scopes.
    - Improvements to Dedup and FRBR Test Utility for Consortia (November & December)
    The Dedup & FRBR Test Utility had not been working for consortia; IZ and NZ records didn't work well together in the utility and you couldn't really tell how they would actually display in Primo VE. With the November release, Ex Libris enhanced the tool so that now both IZ and NZ records are identified. Nancy reported that the tool seems to be working well now. The December release also includes an enhancement to run the recalculate dedup/FRBR job rather than having to request it be run by Ex Libris. These enhancements should give us greater ability to adjust the display of Alma records in Primo VE, for example, ensuring that all electronic and physical holdings for an institution are displaying properly on a single deduped record.
    - QR Code as a Link to Primo Pages (December)
    Ex Libris is replacing the primary Search History link with a link to generate a QR Code; this link will appear on all pages in Primo VE and can be used to share search results (or other Primo VE content), either by scan of the QR code or by a textual "copy link" link. This function will be enabled by default and would need to be toggled off within each individual Primo VE view. The QR Code link can also be added to the Send To page options within each individual Primo VE view.  More details are in the December 2020 Release Note, "Utilize Mobile Device Capabilities – QR Code as a Link to Primo Pages."
    - Support Resource Recommender Configuration per View (December)
    Previously, any Resource Recommenders set up would appear in any and all views in Primo VE. This enhancement should enable the set up of different Resource Recommenders for different views or (presumably) the toggling off of specific recommenders for a given view.
  •  Follow up on outstanding issues / new issues to report
    The group noted some recent fixes to outstanding problems, including:
    - Search Expansion with Controlled Vocabulary - this functionality had been working erratically in local scopes, and then not working at all in any scopes. It now appears to be fully working as expected in all scopes.
    - Saved Searches - Jen reported that they seem to be making progress on a ticket related to duplicate results and emails; Nancy reported that they have been able to satisfactorily close a similar ticket.
    - Problems with "title contains" searches - Nancy and Maggie McGee have a couple of tickets open related to seemingly extraneous records being included in "title contains" search results. The problem seems to be related to the inclusion of subject fields in the "title contains" index, and cross-references from authority records for these fields.  This problem seems likely related to a previously-reported issue with FAST subject headings (see: SUNY Basecamp discussion "Search profile slots question") but is not limited to FAST subject headings.  Jen reported that she has a norm rule that suppresses the display of FAST subject headings, but this may not be sufficient to suppress them from the "title contains" index and its function.