CDI management in Alma determines which providers/databases are activated for search in Primo. It takes the place of the Ex Libris Primo Central Activation Wizard.
There are two settings: Fully Flexible and Easy Active. We will use Fully Flexible, which is the default. Apparently, if you change to Easy Active (through request to Ex Libris), there is no going back.
Tool to check - for a given CDI record in your results list - which collection activation in Alma caused it to appear and why it is flagged or not flagged as full text available. https://cdi-rights-analysis.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/client/help
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“Single Activation: Managing your CDI Collections from Alma” (1/29/2020)
"Single Activation with Alma and CDI" (6/3/2020)
"Moving to CDI and Best Practices for Managing Collections in Alma" (6/24/2020)
"Alma CDI — Single Activation" (9/10/2020)
"CDI Update: Strategies, Tips, and Tricks for Troubleshooting" (11/18/2020)
"More Linking Accuracy for Collections with Different Content Types: Hybrid Collections in CDI and Alma" (8/31/2021)
You can find our documentation and training for CDI here:
Please reach out with any questions about CDI to this e-mail: cdi_info@exlibrisgroup.com
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Notes
User Role needed: CDI Inventory Operator
Our setting: Fully Flexible
After the move, institutions can switch to the EasyActive setting, which may offer other benefits and simplify the activation process. To change the setting, please contact Ex Libris customer support.
Christine Stohn, 6/9/2020: "For each electronic collection/database in the CZ: In EasyActive all collections apart from the collections on the exceptions list (EasyActive collection list) are searchable. There is no option to activate or deactivate them for search. They therefore also do not appear on your Alma IZ, neither with a greyed out icon nor otherwise. For EasyActive you only see in your Alma IZ: 1) your Alma activations for full text, and 2) your Alma activations for the collections on the exception list. The exception list includes for example the subscribed A&I databases that you can only activate if you have a subscription. For those you use the standard Alma activation process, and the collections will appear with the blue icon in Alma. Everything that Alma publishes to CDI as full text active will appear in your Primo filtered search, in the expand search users find everything else from the entire index – that is the content of all active collections from the exceptions list, and from all collections that are not on that list but are indexed in CDI."
Alma CDI — Single Activation webinar, 9/10/2020: EasyActive setting, which turns on almost everything in CDI, applies only to what appears in "Search beyond URI Libraries," because regardless of the Fully Flexible or Easy Active setting, all content you have turned on in Alma is automatically published to CDI (unless you check "Do not show as Full Text available in CDI even if active in Alma").
CDI Search activation status
Active
Select Active only for content that a) you do NOT have in full text, b) for which you have NO active portfolios (CZ or local), and c) for which you want CDI content to show up in Primo. This could be an entire collection that you don't have, or some titles within a collection that you don't have. If you have active portfolios in a collection, CDI is automatically enabled for those titles, whether or not you select Active or Not Active for search for the collection as a whole. Thus, activating a collection for CDI only affects the "Search beyond URI Libraries" search.
Single Activation with Alma and CDI webinar, 6/3/2020: "Note: Activation for search is only useful for content that is not available in full text but you want your users to be able to discover it (through Expand search)" [that is, "Search beyond URI Libraries" search].
Single Activation with Alma and CDI webinar, 6/3/2020: "Note: CDI has no impact on publishing bibliographic records to Primo."
Christine Stohn, 6/5/2020: "If you have any collection with portfolios active in the IZ, local or not, it will be published to CDI. CDI then looks up metadata records in the index that match the records published by Alma and marks them as searchable and available. This triggers them to come up in your search results. So it does not matter if something is local or not. All active portfolios go into the file that Alma publishes to CDI, and CDI finds the match in the index. (That is, provided that the content is actually indexed in CDI of course. If you have a portfolio with no matching content in CDI then nothing happens.)
With Active selected, CDI content for portfolios that are not available in full text (i.e. the portfolios don't exist locally and they have not been activated in the CZ) will show up in Primo search results only in the "Search beyond URI Libraries" tab.
Be careful selecting Active for collections with "Link in Record". Make sure the links work correctly and are proxied if they should be. If not, file a case (because we have Primo Total Care). Note that in response to case #00841321, Ex Libris wrote, "[We] don't have the option to mark specific collections to proxy so I set the configuration so that Open Access collections will not be proxied and everything else will be."
Note that for collections with no service (i.e. databases), the bib record must also be unsuppressed in order for the collection to be available for full text in CDI (meaning for them to show up in filtered search and not just in expanded search, i.e. "Search beyond URI Libraries".)
Not Active
Select Not Active when you do not want a collection (either in whole or in part) to show up in CDI results. This controls only CDI content for which you do not have active portfolios (CZ or local). As explained above, if you have any full text portfolios active (CZ or local) that correspond to content in that collection, those titles will be active for search in CDI regardless of any setting at the collection level. In this case selecting Not Active has no effect. Active portfolios (CZ or local) will always be published to CDI and indexed.
We subscribe to only some titles in this collection
Yes
Select Yes when Full Text Linking in CDI = Linkresolver even if you do subscribe to the whole collection, because full text items in CDI without titles in Alma (e.g. newspaper articles, dissertations) will say they're available in Primo but when the user clicks, the OpenURL link will fail, and then it will say not available. Saying Yes avoids these false positives.
Yes is the default for most collections.
According to Elizabeth York on ALMA-L on 2/10/2025, "This is a bit unintuitive, but for collections that use the link resolver for linking, it can be best to set this to "yes," even if you subscribe to all the titles in the collection. Why? Some indexed material might not be able to make a link resolver match (this can especially be a problem for primary source material or for content without ISSNS or ISBNs). For a link resolver collection, when you set "we subscribe to only some titles in this collection" to "Yes," what you're actually asking Alma/Primo to do is, "only show CDI records in my Primo results if they have a link resolver match." When you set "we subscribe to only some of the titles in this collection" to "No," what you're actually asking is, "Show all CDI indexing associated with this collection in my Primo results whether or not each record has a link resolver match." So, the problem of "records appear in Primo without links" will be solved if you select "We subscribe to only some of the titles in this collection" to "Yes," as that will make it so only the CDI records with link resolver matches appear in Primo. Now, you might then ask, "Why, if I have the whole collection, did some of the CDI indexing records not have link resolver matches?" My guess is that some of the CDI records are for things that don't have portfolios in Alma--maybe they're primary sources or some other content type that isn't likely to work well with link resolver linking. Some CDI collections have linking type "hybrid," which means CDI records for books and journal content—which work well with a link resolver--use the link resolver, while CDI records for primary sources and other materials that don't work well with the link resolver use link in record links built right into their CDI records. If you think a lot of content is being missed from Discovery when you set "We subscribe to only some of the titles in this collection" to "Yes," my general recommendation would be to ask Ex Libris whether this collection would be a possible candidate for hybrid linking.
No
Select No when the CDI collection type is Hybrid Full Text.
Select No when CDI Full Text Linking uses Link in Record and we have everything in the collection.
Select No when CDI Full Text Linking uses Link in Record and the collection is open access.
Single Activation with Alma and CDI webinar, 6/3/2020: If set to No, all of the records in the collection will immediately get the "Full Text Available" indication in CDI, regardless of the holdings file information sent from Alma. That is, the holdings file is not consulted. Why is this setting needed? Primarily for collections where holdings file is hard to match with CDI content because of lack of good identifiers. By setting to No when you do, in fact, have everything in the collection, it makes CDI's life a little easier.
Alma CDI — Single Activation webinar, 9/10/2020: Set to No is ONLY a relevant choice for collections with "Full Text Linking in CDI: Link in record". (This would apply if, for some reason, you only have some titles in the collection turned on in Alma but you want all titles activated for CDI.)
Do not show as Full Text available in CDI even if active in Alma
Unchecked
Unchecked is the default. Keep unchecked if the CDI content from that collection is not cluttering search results and is proving useful.
When this setting is unchecked, CDI content from that CDI collection for active portfolios (CZ or local) will appear in Primo search results. This means that if you have an active e-journal portfolio (from any collection), articles from that journal from the CDI collection in question will appear in Primo search results. If you have an active e-book portfolio (from any collection), chapters from that book from the CDI collection in question will appear in Primo search results, and if it is a reference book, entries from the reference book from the CDI collection in question will appear in Primo search results.
Checked
Set to checked if the CDI content from that CDI collection is cluttering the search results and creating duplicate entries. For example, there will be always be duplicate e-book records in CDI results when there exists a local e-book portfolio and this setting is unchecked for any CDI collection that also contains that e-book. (Multiple CDI records for the same item are merged, but CDI records are not merged with Primo records; this was the case with Primo Central as well.)
Case #00841321: "1) This is a normal behavior, one record is a local record from Alma, and the second one is a CDI record, therefore, they cannot be merged."
Christine Stohn, email 5/14/2020: "...All full text portfolios are published to CDI (in addition to the bib records being published to the local Primo index – thus the duplicates). We do not currently deduplicate between the local and the central indexes."
Alma CDI — Single Activation webinar, 9/10/2020: Covers this topic, how to handle duplicate ebooks in CDI results.
When this setting is checked, article and chapter information from the CDI collection in question will not show up in Primo search results (local or expanded), but related active portfolios will always show up in local search results (e.g. at the journal or book level). Note that CDI content from a different CDI collection that also contains metadata related to the active portfolio may still show up in Primo search results, unless it too is checked. This prevents clutter and duplicate records but the downside is that article and chapter level metadata may not appear in Primo search results.
In email of 7/10/2020, Christine Stohn says, "If you activate the collection for search and you choose the "Do not show as Full Text available" option from CDI then the books will be searchable in the expand search and flagged as no full text available."
When this setting is checked for a CDI collection, results from that CDI collection will not show up in Primo search results but will still be available to the link resolver, that is, they will show up in the View It box.
Add CDI-only full text activation
Alma CDI — Single Activation webinar, 9/10/2020: ONLY a relevant choice for collections with "Full Text Linking in CDI: Link in record". (This would apply if you wanted to use CDI records instead of Alma bibs and portfolios to avoid duplication of results in Primo... as an alternative to checking "Do not show as Full Text available in CDI even if active in Alma" and losing chapter- and article-level access.)
Notes
Christine Stohn, 5/14/2020: In CDI, search activations are only necessary for content that you do not have available in full text. For example if you subscribe to only a subset of titles in a collection and have those portfolios active in Alma, then this subset will be published to CDI and become searchable in Primo. There is no need for a separate search activation. All of your full text portfolios are automatically published to CDI and therefore searchable. In order to not have duplicate records in Primo, suppress the e-book records from being published to CDI by checking "Do not show as Full Text available in CDI even if Active in Alma". The downside to this is that book chapters in CDI for those e-books won't appear in Alma. (In some cases, duplicates are coming from CDI itself due to a failure to merge, and this is not desired behavior. File a case.)
Christine Stohn, 12/11/2023, Yes, We’re Open! Open Access in Knowledgebases and Discovery webinar (58:00): For collections in the CZ of type "Database," if you do NOT choose the checkbox "CDI-only full text activation," then you HAVE to unsuppress the CZ bib if you want CDI results from the database to show up in Primo.
Alma CDI — Single Activation webinar, 9/10/2020: Link in record is always preferred by CDI if there are duplicate CDI records, one that uses Linkresolver and one that uses Link in Record. Customer cannot control this setting. Access will default to Link in Record. Ex Libris is studying making this setting customizable.