The Parallel Universe of Electronic Resource Discovery, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Community Zone

Abstract

Before Alma, our library went to great lengths to add, delete and maintain bibliographic records and URLs for electronic resources in Aleph and to ensure that our holdings for these records were also reflected accurately in WorldCat. As the scope and quantity of our electronic resources grew this was increasingly a losing battle. Since implementing Alma we have learned to stop worrying about keeping up with the titles that are added and removed from most of our electronic collections, and we no longer worry about the coordination of Alma and WorldCat records. Whenever we subscribe to an electronic collection in its entirety (our biggest and most complicated collections) we use the Alma auto-active setting to manage title-level access and discovery in Primo, and we let the OCLC WorldShare Collection Manager (aka WorldCat Knowledge Base) manage our OCLC holdings symbol settings and access and discovery on the FirstSearch/Worldcat.org/WorldShare Discovery Services side of the discovery house. This frees us to do a better job of keeping up with titles in smaller, more selective collections, and we are optimistic that the development of dynamic interactions between vendors and Alma will continue to simplify the processes for managing access to electronic resources.