FAQs

• Overview
• Activating/Deactivating Search
• Testing
• Search Rights

Role needed: 

• CDI Operator (won’t see Activate for CDI searching without it)

CDI Overview:

• Search packages:
  • Any active electronic portfolios are automatically searchable in unexpanded and expanded search, including any articles from full-text journals or book chapters. No extra “search package” needs to be turned on to make active portfolios searchable.
  • Making a collection active for search adds additional search records to your expanded search, for content that you may not own. For example, if you only buy a few titles from a selective package, making that package active for search adds all the non-purchased titles and articles/chapters to your expanded search, which might be useful for Interlibrary Loan.
• Models: Ex Libris prefers that institutions use the Easy Active model, which manages CDI settings for you. SUNY is grandfathered to use the fully flexible CDI model, which lets us have more control over which packages are activated for search.
• EBSCO: Unlike in the previous search model (Primo Central Index), you do not need "alternative coverage" for EBSCO content with the CDI because all titles will publish as available and match on search records.
• Migration Date: SUNY Content migrated from the Primo Central Index (PCI) to the Central Discovery Index (CDI) on November 17, 2019, so if you find a collection in your system that was created on that date, it was probably migrated from the PCI.

Activating/Deactivating CDI Search:

• Activation:
  • Look up collection in CZ, click three dots at right to activate for CDI searching, or adjust CDI search settings during collection activation.
  • It's recommended to say yes to "we subscribe to only some titles in this collection" even if you purchase the whole thing. Search record matching in the CDI works better title by title than by collection, as the collection records may include content that isn't part of your subscription, like blogs, etc.
  • Not all vendors provide search records to the CDI, so some won’t have option to activate.
  • Some packages, like EBSCO, say that you can activate them for search, but EBSCO search records are not actually part of the CDI. EBSCO full-text will be searched whether or not you activate for CDI searching.
• Search Only Packages:
  • You don't need to "Activate" a collection to make it Active for Search. It's a good idea to activate large, respected vendor packages (e.g. Wiley, Taylor & Francis, etc.) in order to populate your expanded search with requestable articles/chapters.
  • Packages only active for search and not for both search and fulfillment have black icon next to them in the IZ.
• eBooks:
  • Because eBooks aren't requestable via ILL, it's best to leave CDI Search activation status as Not Active for ebook collections. You don't want to frustrate patrons by showing them eBooks in your Primo VE that aren't requestable.
  • You can hide duplicate titles for eBooks by choosing the "Do not show as Full Text available in CDI even if active in Alma" checkbox in your CDI setting tab, but not that this will also hide chapter search records for this collection.
    
  • To hide title level ebooks from showing in your search results but keep the chapter level search, go to Discovery>Search Configuration>Search Profiles. Any profiles that include the Central Discovery Index (CDI) are considered "Blended" profiles. Click the three dots to the right and choose Edit if you would like to filter that content. The Exclude CDI Books checkbox will prevent duplicate entries for title level bib records from showing in Primo, but test to be sure that it doesn't also hide Link in Record type eBooks where the CDI is the only source for the content.
     
• Roles: If you don't see the Activate for CDI search option, check your roles to make sure you have CDI Operator.

• It should take no longer than 48 hours for changes to go into effect for activating or deactivating.
• Active or inactive for CDI search will only affect expanded searching.

• "Restricted for search" / "Search Rights = Subscription" collections in CDI: Be careful activating these for search and only activate those for which you have a subscription. You can identify them by CDI fields Search Rights: Free or Search Rights: Subscription
• If Search: equals “subscription,” this means that you need to have a subscription to this product in order to search it. If you subscribe to a collection and have it set up so that users don’t have to login to use it from inside of a specific IP range, then users would be able to search without logging in from inside of that range. But, if a user was outside of that IP range and did not login before starting their search, they’d get no results from that database index search. They might still get fulfillment links to that database if the indexing overlapped with another collection that allowed free searches, but they wouldn’t be able to search that specific database index.

Ex Libris Documentation:

• CDI Collection Lists
• Resource Types in CDI