During CDI availability calculation, only the Year, Month and Day fields (not the Volume and Issue fields) are used in the calculation.
This means that if you have a portfolio activated for the Journal of Science and have a specified coverage statement of Vol 16, Issue 1 - Volume 18, Issue 6, CDI will calculate your full-text availability as the full run of the journal, not only the issues within that coverage statement. You will then see articles in Primo search results that your institution does not have access to.
Best Practice: For improved accuracy in CDI results, it is recommended to use coverage date ranges instead of issue numbers (or a combination of both).
Ex Libris has no plans to change this because it is a complex development, though it is on their general enhancement list.
Per Ex Libris, as of April 11, 2024, the impacted DOIs have been corrected with their providers, as well as with CrossRef and Unpaywall.
There have been some widespread linking issues with Unpaywall (both Quicklinks and the Community Zone collection) in which some journal links direct users to inappropriate websites. According to Ex Libris, this can happen when a journal ceases publication and its domain registration expires - malicious sites take over the expired domains.
Within the CZ collection, the issue has been temporarily addressed by blocking bad DOI links from the collection. Primo users will see the indication that they have full text access, but the link will not be accessible. This is a temporary solution while Ex Libris works to resolve the issue on a larger scale. During this time, you may notice some linking issues with Unpaywall CDI records. This should only affect the malicious links and not every link in the collection.
Unfortunately, while Ex Libris is able to block bad domains from the CZ collection, they are not able to do the same with Unpaywall Quicklinks, because these links are made available via an API. If you would like to disable Unpaywall Quicklinks while this issue is ongoing, you can do so by going to Configuration > Discovery > Configure Views, editing your production view, and unchecking the box in the General tab that says "Display Unpaywall Links":
There is a widespread issue with hybrid ProQuest collections (containing both abstract and full-text content). A configuration change caused some of these records to show as full text available when they do not provide full-text access, and to show as no full text available when they do have full-text access. The issue has now been resolved, but due to the sheer number of these records in the CDI, the records may not all be updated until the end of April.
UPDATE: Beginning in February 2024, CDI Quicklinks and Link in Record links will be able to use Alma linking parameters. More information can be found in this article. The change will be gradual, with an initial focus on Gale and ProQuest. If you have Gale or ProQuest collections with CDI content activated in Alma, please be sure you have entered linking parameters for these collections.
In Link in Record collections, links are formatted with the OpenAthens redirector and do not include an institution's account ID. For some collections, Link in Record linking works as expected and leads correctly to the content. With ProQuest and some other vendors, links require an account ID embedded in the link.
Link in Record does not work properly for these collections as the links are typically designed to provide access through the institution's account ID in the URL. This is a common issue with ProQuest Congressional and ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, but can affect other Link in Record collections as well.
For more information about CDI linking methods, see CDI and Linking to Electronic Full Text.
You can see the full text linking setup for a particular collection by clicking "Edit Collection," navigating to the CDI tab, and viewing the CDI Institution Settings:
What does "link in record" mean? In cases where the record is uniquely available from a single platform and/or the link is difficult or impossible to create using the link resolver, Primo will use the link stored in the record, which has been provided by the information provider, in CDI. This method is used for approximately 40 percent of collections. Collections that use this method include video collections such as Alexander Street Press, some reference collections, or collections that contain special and unique material.
From the CDI record itself, you can identify that it is a "link in record" two ways: 1) the "access content in..." verbiage in the "View Online" section and 2) the link itself - when you hover over the link to view the URL, you will see the actual URL with the OpenAthens redirector + the platform, and not the Primo-style redirect.
As of right now, the only configuration option for “link in record” collections is a blanket Proxy yes/no for CDI full text. These types of collections do not provide the ability to enter custom linking parameters such as an account ID.
Example: https://usf-flvc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01FALSC_USF/un0hgn/cdi_proquest_journals_302190379
The only solution at this time for Link in Record issues like these is a URL override. Obviously, as in some cases this affects an entire collection, this is not an ideal or preferred solution. FLVC and several other institutions have made Ex Libris aware of these issues.
Ex Libris has only limited ability to influence the behavior of the record produced by the OpenURL link because much of what is presented is controlled by the metadata that is sent from the vendor platform.
For systems like Ex Libris' CDI, a decision must be made on whether precision or recall is more important– do they want to get as many records as possible even if some are incomplete or have metadata mistakes, or do they design the system to focus on perfect matches, knowing some records will be missed. Generally these sorts of databases prefer recall over precision on the idea that it is better if people know something exists but might not link correctly than to not know it exists at all. With CDI, you have to accept some imperfect records and some imperfect linking as a tradeoff for the breadth.
When reviewing an OpenURL error, look for:
Solution: These can usually be fixed by contacting the vendor, or, putting in a case with Ex Libris who will contact the vendor.
Example: https://openurl.ebsco.com/c/ixlsld/openurl?sid=Primo&atitle=young+adult+literature&date=2005&genre=bookitem&prompt=true&title=The+Continuum+encyclopedia+of+American+literature&isbn=0-8264-1517-2
In Primo and the above OpenURL, you see the date 2005, but EBSCO has indexed the publication date as 2003. (In EBSCO, you can see a note that it was updated in 2005, but it's not reflected in the date field).
Solution: NONE. Submitting a case for these will not lead to a fix. Ex Libris will reply with "This is an issue that does not always have a solution."
Example 1: Book Reviews:
Indexers interpret cataloging rules in transcribing article titles, and sometimes vendors interpret that information differently. For example, when you view a PDF for some book reviews, you will see why it is confusing. There is sometimes a section called “Reviews” and it is in the same font and font size as the other article titles. The reviews in that section are arranged as though they are sections of the article called “Reviews”. In other journals, each review will be formatted as though each review is its own article and this can lead different human indexers or machine indexing algorithms to make different interpretations as to what the actual article is – is it the whole Reviews section or the individual reviews within it? And when the title of the review is the same as the title of the book, that causes an issue. It is hard to tell on a quick glance if the bib record in the catalog is the actual item, or just a review of the item and this can lead to OpenURL linking issues if the title is the only metadata being matched.
Example 2: Missing Info:
In this case, a ProQuest CDI record is trying to link to an EBSCO resource. The OpenURL being sent looks like this - https://openurl.ebsco.com/c/zvu4vt/openurl?sid=Primo&volume=115&atitle=moving+from+financial+literacy+to+financial+empowerment&date=20230301&spage=39&issn=0194-5947&issue=2&genre=article&prompt=true&title=ABA+banking+journal.&epage=40
But if you look at EBSCO platform, it doesn't have the volume number listed for this resource, so it doesn't match. To test, remove the volume parameter and see if it works. So here's the URL to test:
https://openurl.ebsco.com/c/zvu4vt/openurl?sid=Primo&atitle=moving+from+financial+literacy+to+financial+empowerment&date=20230301&spage=39&issn=0194-5947&issue=2&genre=article&prompt=true&title=ABA+banking+journal.&epage=40
This URL works, but again, this is not something Ex Libris can fix, as it's a difference in indexing between the vendors.
Solution: Contact the publisher to ask if the content can be added to the database. Sometimes the content can be added, especially if there is a large amount of missing content like an entire issue of a journal.
Submitting a case to Ex Libris for these will not lead to a fix. Ex Libris may respond with an answer like this: "CDI is primarily a collection of citations, so if the citation metadata is correct then there is nothing we can do on our end. The CDI knows that this article belongs in this journal, and knows that that you have a subscription to this title for this year (based on your Alma subscriptions). Therefore it displays the article citation as part of your subscribed content and creates an OpenURL link based on the citation metadata. We do not have article-level rights (only database-level and title-level), so Primo has no way to know that this particular article is not available on the platform."
There is a link for Academic Search Complete in this CDI record, but when this issue was reported, the article did not exist in that database. There was only one issue for 2019 in Academic Search Complete and it does not contain this article. The CDI record indicates the article is from Volume 26, Issue 10, but there was no Volume 26 issue 10 in the database. The link took users to an error message that said EBSCO was unable to locate the article. When users tried to search for the article within the publication, no results were retrieved.
In this case, FLVC opened a case with EBSCO and EBSCO added the missing issues to the database. The link now correctly locates the article in Academic Search Complete.