Over the years, CRL has made its catalog records available to members in a variety of ways: tape loading, record sets from OCLC, and since 2006, via ftp on a quarterly schedule. This past year, CRL has also made its records available to subscribers of Ex Libris’ Primo Central and ProQuest’s Summon through their knowledge bases. EBSCO Discovery Services will begin loading CRL records this month.

Although these systems are mainly associated with finding articles or book chapters from electronic resources, several CRL subscribing members recognized their potential to bring all CRL resources to the attention of their users. Loading records into local catalogs has a significant impact on use of CRL material—both downloads of digitized material and requests to digitize physical resources. The systems make it easy to see what is digitized and how to request CRL material that is not digitized.

Each of the systems follows the same plan. All of CRL’s 1.4 million records are loaded and indexed to make discovery of all of CRL’s resources easy. Each system also indexed the OCR-generated text available from CRL digitized material, which includes about 18,000 titles.

The activation of CRL records is similar in each system. The CRL collection is chosen by subscribing members to be activated.

For Primo:

The activation of the “Center for Research Libraries” is available to all Primo Central customers from its Activations system (registration module). All that needs to be done is to check the “Center for Research Libraries” collections as shown in the image below:
 

CRL makes updates available to Primo and EBSCO Discovery Service on a quarterly basis.  Summon harvests the records from the CRL catalog.

Please include CRL in your planning or testing of the system if you activate CRL records through one of these systems. We will be able to help you determine if records are displaying all of the information you need to access our resources.