Electronic resources in a consortial implementation of alma and primo

Abstract

The California State University system implemented Ex Libris’s Alma and Primo as a consortium in 2017. Consortial management of electronic resources in these systems has offered significant benefits as well as surprises and difficulties. While Alma is able to support a consortium with multiple ways of acquiring and accessing electronic resources, the result is an architecture that is more complex than the setup for print resources. Similarly, Primo is able to manage the complexity of bibliographic records from twenty-three libraries as well as article-level discovery records, but its mechanisms for this may be counterintuitive at times. This article discusses some of those details and also addresses the interlibrary communication that has developed to meet the demands of this shared implementation.