CDI Limit by Availability

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Recommendation

Harmonization is undesirable due to the unique needs of each campus. Each campus should make the decision based upon their collection and user needs.

Background

Prior to the migration to a consortium, campuses were able to curate their CDI collections. While this required them to turn on access to individual collections, it also allowed them to weed out collections with poor metadata.

The UC Library system is now on EasyActive. “Alma collections that you have active because you subscribe to their full text will become automatically searchable in CDI. For those collections no separate search activations are necessary.”

https://uc-sils.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/P4D/pages/1845170321

“It is also important to note that while CDI collections in the EasyActive model cannot be “de-searchified” (ie. hidden from users even in expanded results sets), administrators can “override” the full-text activation, effectively hiding these collections behind the “Expand” option (for campuses limiting by availability).”

Campuses are allowed to decide for themselves if they would have their default search limit CDI results by availability or not.

We are revisiting this issue in order to provide guidance and examples of the pros and cons of limiting by availability or not.

What is Filter by Availability?

Open

• CDI has tens of millions of records. By default, a search will surface all CDI results regardless of availability to the library.

• When configuring a search profile that includes the Central Index search scope, libraries can opt to “Filter by Availability” so that the search profile will not surface results that do not have full text availability. So, the only CDI records that would display would be those with full text availability.

• This setting causes the “Expand My Results” toggle to display. Then, if a user wants to include results for CDI records that do not contain full text, they can select the Expand My Results check box.

Options Considered

Local Decisions

UCR: Our default search profile, Articles, Books, and More, includes CDI collections unfiltered. UCR decided this for now in the spirit of providing as much access to outside resources as possible.

However, the local IZ catalog, UC Riverside Catalog, includes the CDI scope filtered by availability, and excluding ebooks.

Open

UC Riverside Catalog search profile. 11/2022

The idea was that we wanted the UCR Library profile to show users what they could theoretically get “right now” by walking to a shelf or clicking an available online link. The only items they would have to put any kind of request on would be print items that were checked out/lost/in transit. We excluded eBooks to reduce duplication because CDI and IZ holdings do not dedupe.

The second code, IZ_CRRestricted, is the MyInstitution scope modified to exclude records flagged as course reserve restricted in order to keep restricted items (such as professor copies) from surfacing outside of the course reserve search scope.

UCSF: Our default search profile (‘Search articles, books, and more’) includes CDI collections, and we have Filter by Availability turned on

We don't have any undergrads and it’s usually more important to our audiences to see everything (rather than only what’s available now).

UCI: Our default search profile “Articles, books, and more” is set to not filter by availability and also exclude CDI eBooks

We have decided to leave the filter off in favor of increasing the discoverability of resources that would otherwise be hidden initially by having it on. In most cases tested, the results of the search with the filter on or off returned a large number of results and the tester was doubtful of how useful it was only having a slightly smaller result set vs the increased visibility of more records that were also relevant.

UCSC: Our default search profile, “Articles, books, and more” is set to filter by availability

Our local team prioritizes undergraduate student success when making design and configuration decisions. Our testing with undergraduate students indicates that students expect most materials in UC Library Search to be available immediately (either online or on the shelf). We found that not filtering by availability too frequently retrieved results where fewer than 70% of items were availability immediately. We are concerned about the obstacles filtering by availability presents for users attempting to find known item CDI materials that are not “available” and we continue to work on interface changes to facilitate the discovery of these materials.

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