How do we prevent titles from being deduplicated in Primo VE on a case-by-case basis?
Answer
Deduplication occurs in Primo VE when identifiers match. This is a very helpful feature in certain cases. For instance, it combines ebooks and print books, so users see full-text and print request links in the same record.
We have seen problems, though. In one case, a textbook came in different editions where one was a subset of another. The ISBNs in the two versions overlapped, and so Primo ended up deduplicating them, which was misleading for users.
We can prevent deduplication for particular titles in the following way.
- Determine which titles are being combined in Primo and locate them in Alma. Note the MMS IDs.
- If any of the titles are linked to the Network Zone, open them in the Metadata Editor. Use Record Actions - Copy to Catalog to unlink them from the NZ, then release the records from the MDE. If the records are linked to the NZ, we will be unable to prevent deduplication.
- Create an All Titles set of the bib records. One way to do this is to do an advanced search for the relevant MMS IDs, joined with the Or operator, and save the query as a set.
- Run the Prevent FRBR and/or Dedup in Discovery job on the set with the following parameters.
- Prevent FRBR in Discovery? Yes (this actually doesn't matter because at Los Rios we are not using FRBR, but it doesn't hurt
- Prevent Dedup in Discovery? Yes (that's the important part).
Recall that it may take up to 20 minutes for the results to be visible in Primo VE. For the titles to remain separate in Primo VE, we will need to keep them as IZ-only records.