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CDI and Electronic Collections: What Does the “in CDI = Yes” Flag Mean and Why Is It Important?

  • Product: Alma
  • Product Version: July 2020
  • Relevant for Installation Type: Multi-Tenant Direct

What Does the “in CDI = Yes” Flag Mean and Why Is It Important?

What Does the “in CDI = Yes” Flag Mean?

“In CDI = Yes” indicates the degree to which an electronic collection’s records are covered by the global CDI database. If “In CDI = Yes”, then more than 80 % of a collection are covered by CDI. For instance, if you have an electronic collection with journals and it shows “In CDI = Yes”, CDI can provide your discovery system with more than 80% of the articles from these journals. In other words, “In CDI = Yes” does NOT indicate any configuration that is specific to your own institution and does by itself neither indicate that your discovery system will show or will not show CDI results for this collection (regardless of expand or filtered search). Whether your discovery system shows CDI records for an electronic collection depends on other parameters (most importantly the full-text availability).

In the August 2020 Release of Alma, the “In CDI = Yes” flag will be renamed to “Available for CDI Search activation”.

Note that prior to the June 2020 Release, there also was an “In CDI = No” flag when CDI covered less than 80 % of the collection. But since the “In CDI = No” flag caused confusion, this field does not appear anymore since June 2020.

Why Is “in CDI = Yes” Important?

The “In CDI = Yes” or “Available for CDI Search activation” is important as it indicates the degree to which a collection is covered by CDI (namely more than 80%). This helps librarians with the Fully Flexible option to decide, for instance, whether to activate a collection for CDI search.

Note that prior to the July 2020 release update of Alma, the “In CDI = Yes” set an important switch concerning the configurability of an electronic collection. Until July 2020, the electronic collection editor showed the “CDI” tab only if “In CDI = Yes”. In other words, you could not configure and suppress electronic collections with less than 80% coverage. Since the July release update, the CDI tab also appears in collections with less than 80% coverage.

Further Reading

What Does the “in CDI = Yes” Flag Mean?

  • Managing Electronic Resources: https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/...onic_Resources
    • “CDI tab – This tab appears only when the collection is indexed in CDI (i.e. In CDI = Yes).”
  • Known Gaps and Issues: https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/...aps_and_Issues
    • “Currently in Alma, it is only possible to suppress portfolios from being published to CDI if the collection is marked with In CDI: yes. This is especially problematic for ebook collections that are not in CDI because the results list contains their bibliographic records as well as the CDI records.
      To allow you to suppress all your relevant ebook collections, we are going to make the following changes:
      The "Do not show as Full Text available in CDI even if active in Alma suppression" function will be added to all collections with services and portfolios that are not marked with In CDI: yes. For these ebook collections, we will also add a CDI tab on the Electronic Collection Editor page that contains only this suppression function.
      A search filter will be added to Alma to allow you to filter by collections that have this setting. […] ”

Why Is “in CDI = Yes” Important?

  • Managing Electronic Resources: https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/...onic_Resources 
    • "In CDI – Yes indicates that at least 80% of the content of the collection is searchable in CDI. No indicates the data in the collection is not searchable or less than 80% of the content is searchable in CDI."
  • Known Gaps and Issues: https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/...aps_and_Issues 
    • “A number of collections have the In CDI flag set to No. This indicates that the collection cannot be activated for search separately from the search activations, but it caused confusion because the collections can still be indexed in CDI. This was changed to not show the In CDI = No flag anymore, and the In CDI = Yes flag will remain, because it marks collections that can be activated for search separately from the full text activation.”
    • “Based on feedback from customers, we will change the name of the In CDI flag to Available for CDI search activation in the Alma interface to make its meaning clearer.”
  • Alma Release Notes, July Release Update: https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/...mon=202007BASE
    • "You now have the option to suppress/unsuppress collections in the CDI tab, even when they are not marked as In CDI: Yes. The CDI tab is now shown for all CDI users. When In CDI is not Yes, limited information will be displayed in the CDI tab. If there are portfolios, the Suppress option is available. Otherwise, a message is displayed to indicate that there is nothing to display. For multi-campus installations, the suppress option is displayed in the Group section (also with limited information)."

  • Article last edited: 13-Jul-2020