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    Contributing to the Community Zone – Portfolios

    Translatable
    To contributing to the Community Zone, you must have one of the following roles:
    • Electronic Inventory Operator
    • Repository Manager
    • Purchase Operator
    • Purchase Manager
     
    Contributions to the Alma Community Zone includes portfolios. With this capability, when you encounter wrong information on the portfolio level, you can correct the information and share the correction with the entire community. Additionally, you can contribute new portfolios to existing selected electronic collections.
    Portfolio contributions can be made to the following electronic collections:
    • Free E- Journals – collection ID 61110976638852340

    • Miscellaneous Ejournals – collection ID   61111016833201000

    • Miscellaneous Free eBooks – collection ID 611000000000001091

    • Miscellaneous eBooks – collection ID 611000000000001090

    • U.S. Government Documents – collection ID 613170000000000069

    • Freely Accessible Business Journals – collection ID 615280000000001780

    • Freely Accessible General Interest Journals – collection ID 615280000000001781

    • Freely Accessible Arts & Humanities Journals – collection ID 615280000000001779

    • Freely Accessible Social Science Journals – collection ID 615280000000001783

    • Freely Accessible Science Journals – collection ID 615280000000001782

    • Freely Accessible Medical Journals – collection ID 614910000000003147

    • NewspaperARCHIVE.com – Collection ID: 613780000000001293

    • Editing portfolios need to be done in the Institution Zone and contributed to the Community Zone.
    • When editing Portfolios, only the Parser parameter (Override) and coverage are contributed.
    • Editing a Community Zone record takes about 24 hours for the changes to show in the Community Zone.
    See Contributing to the Community Zone – Bibliographic Records for information about other Community Zone contribution functionality within Alma.
    In order to use the Community Zone contribution functionality, your institution must be in production. Refer to the Community Zone Contribution Guidelines for additional details.
    Note that currently there is a limitation with updating contributed portfolios to include removing embargo information from portfolios that you have contributed. Contact Support as needed for assistance, and refer to the development roadmap for any changes regarding this.
    Contribution requires the user to add ALL the coverage information that should be contributed, years and embargo.

    Contributing Electronic Portfolios to the Community Zone

    Use the following procedure to contribute electronic portfolios to the Community Zone.

    To contribute electronic portfolios to the Community Zone:
    1. After completing a search for one of the following electronic collections that contains the portfolio to be contributed to the Community Zone, open the Portfolios tab on the Electronic Service Editor page:
      • Free E- Journals
      • Miscellaneous Ejournals
      • Miscellaneous Free eBooks
      • Miscellaneous eBooks
      • U.S. Government Documents
      You can also dynamically add a local portfolio using Add Local Portfolio on the Portfolios tab and, subsequently, contribute that portfolio to the Community Zone.
      New portfolios that are contributed must contain a URL.
    2. For the portfolio that you want to contribute to the Community Zone, select Contribute from the row actions list. The Contribute Portfolio to Community page opens. In the Portfolio Information section on the Contribute Portfolio to Community page, Alma lists the portfolio information to be contributed.
      If the contribution that you are making is an updated portfolio (not a new portfolio) that is already a part of the electronic collection, Before and After columns appear in the Portfolio Information section.
      For updated portfolios (when you select Contribute for a global portfolio), the portfolio must contain at least one change in information, such as URL or coverage fields. When determining the coverage/availability that is to be contributed to the Community Zone for a portfolio, Alma first looks at the Which coverage statement will be applied? setting. If a portfolio has both local and global coverage, but Only local is selected, only the local coverage is contributed and it will override the global coverage of the portfolio in the Community Zone. If a portfolio's setting is Only global, the local coverage is not contributed and the global coverage will override the local coverage of the portfolio in the Community Zone. If a portfolio's setting is Global or local or Global and local, all coverage is contributed to the Community Zone. (For more information about these settings, see Coverage tab.)
    3. Select Next.
      When you contribute new portfolios, Alma attempts to match the bibliographic record that is associated with the portfolio to the bibliographic records in the Community Zone. In cases where multiple matches are found, Alma displays the potential matches and provides you the option to select the correct Community Zone bibliographic record that can be handled in the following manner:
      1. Select the preferred record and select Next.
      2. In the Bibliographic Record Handle Policy section, select one of the following:
        • Use descriptive metadata from the community – Select this option in order to associate the portfolio with the matched Community Zone bibliographic record.
        • Keep local descriptive metadata – When selecting this option, the bibliographic record associated with the portfolio in the Community Zone will be the matched Community Zone bibliographic record, but the bibliographic record associated with the portfolio in the contributor’s environment will remain local. This option is available for those institutions that want to contribute only the portfolio and not the bibliographic record.
        • Merge local descriptive metadata with descriptive metadata from the community – Select this option to merge the local bibliographic record and the matched bibliographic record in the Community Zone. The merge is handled by adding new fields (not overlaying or removing fields).
    4. Select Next.
      The Contribute Portfolio Summary section appears. The information provided in this section varies depending on what changes occur or are selected during the contribution process.
      The Local Fields will be removed summary comment means that local linking fields will turn into community fields and that propriety local fields such as PO line license and so forth will remain local and will not be contributed.
    5. Select Contribute. After the portfolio contribution is completed, the Availability icon for the portfolio will change from the local icon to the community icon in the Availability column.

    Alma indicates who contributed and made modifications to Community Zone Bib records and portfolios. Community Zone Bibliographic records and portfolios within editable collections (Management level: Community) featured a sole Contributed By field for contributions. When institutions (with appropriate contribution permissions) edited these Bibliographic records and portfolios, the editing institution's name was displayed as the "Contributor."

     

    To further enhance this function, the Modified By field is introduced for Bibliographic records and portfolios in the Community Zone search results. This field captures edits that have been both contributed and made. Importantly, the original Contributed By value remains intact and won't be overwritten.

     

    Each portfolio displays the Contributed By field exclusively. Since there is no way to retrieve historical data for portfolio contributions, this data has not been corrected. In the future, when a modification occurs, a Modified By field will become visible.