Activating an Alma Electronic Collection in your Institution Zone

Last edit January 27, 2022

When your library purchases an electronic subscription or finds a useful free/open access collection, you may activate the e-collection in your institution zone. These instructions apply to I-Share institutions that are not using Alma Acquisitions at all or at least not with e-collections. If your institution uses Alma Acquisitions, these steps will not fully apply. See Activation Workflows for more detailed Alma Ex Libris documentation on activating e-collections. For more on Acquisitions see training inAlma Essentials.

Demo Video of "Activating an Alma Electronic Collection" (6:00)

1. In Alma, check your "User Details" Roles section. Make sure you have these roles active:

    Electronic Inventory Operator
    Electronic Inventory Operator Extended
    Repository Manager

2. Look up the electronic collection in your library's Alma Community Zone.

Identify the Community Zone collection that best matches your library's purchase or selection.

3. For the collection in question, click on the "Activate" button.

4. On the Activation Wizard screen, you may change the Public or display name of the e-collection. In the full text service section, you must select "Activate this electronic collection" and "Make service available." You may select "Automatically activate new portfolios" if your library wants all newly added portfolios to be activated immediately in the e-collection. You may add an "Active from" date.  When ready click "Next."

If you selected "Automatically activate new portfolios", you will get this confirmation pop up. Click on "Confirm."

5. Next, for the collection and portfolio(s) bibliographic records, select either "No or "Yes" for Proxy enabled. This example is "No" because it's a free resource.  If yes proxy enabled, then select which proxy to use from "Proxy selected" list. Then click "Next".

Next, for the collection and portfolio(s) bibliographic records, select either:

• "Activate All" to activate all the portfolios or titles within the e-collection
• "Activate electronic collection and selected portfolios via Excel file" if you have a file prepared of the specific titles you library wants to activate within the e-collection
• "Manual Activation" just activate the collection with zero active portfolios or titles. You will activate by hand any appropriate portfolios separate from this activation task.
• When ready, click on "Next."

You'll get a confirmation screen. Click on "Activate" to proceed.

6. You should get a message similar to this:

For very small packages or database type e-collections, there may be no job submitted to activate the collection.

7. You may check the Admin > Monitor Jobs list for progress on the addition of the portfolio bibliographic records. You will receive an email from Alma when the job is done.

8. You may now look up the collection in your library's _Alma_ institution zone. 

NOTE: E-collections can take up to three days to be fully indexed in PrimoVE searches. There are separate indexing jobs for the catalog type and the CDI "Everything" or articles type search slots in PrimoVE.  You may have to wait three days (or in rare cases longer) to search and find the activated e-titles and articles from them in your PrimoVE. For more info see Publishing to Central Discovery Index.