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No More Jargon: Standardizing the Public Name (Override) Field

Evelyn Goessling egoessling@law.uci.edu

Jennifer Kim jeni.kim@uci.edu

Maricar Laudato mlaudat@uci.edu

eCAUG | October 7, 2026

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Where we started

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Long and inconsistent link text in our catalog records.

Annual package names
Terms like:

EBA
DDA
Purchased/Unpurchased
All/Complete
Frontlist
Part 1/Module 1
Tier 3

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Where we are now

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Improved standardization and accessibility.

Guidelines published and implemented:

Succinct phrases that describe the link destination
Standardized spelling and punctuation

eBook, not EBOOK or Digital Book
No period at the end

Spell out names, reduce acronyms

Taylor & Francis, not T&F

No longer using:

Monographs, EBA, DDA, etc.
"2024 Frontlist"

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What did it take to get here?

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Timeline and time investment

2018: Migration to Ex Libris

February 2025: Kick-off meeting, guidelines first draft shared

Collection Strategies: ~3 hours, including 4 meetings
Technical Services (combined Main Campus and Law): ~5 hours
Interdepartmental meetings: 3
Emails: many!

June 2026: Guidelines second draft

July 2026: Guidelines published in Library Wiki

In our previous system before we migrated to Ex Libris in 2018, what we now call “collections” were called “packages.” When we migrated, "package names" became what was in the Electronic Collection Public Name field, and conventions and habits in our libraries persisted where “package names,” were used as display text in the catalog, without much editing.

This habit wasn't really scrutinized until February 2025, when the collection strategies librarians at our Law and Main Campus libraries got together and kicked off this project.

In the year and a half after that kick-off meeting, we estimated around 5 hours of work in technical services directly editing the Override field, plus around 3 hours of discussion in Collection Strategies, plus an unknown number of hours in support of that work, spent writing emails, scheduling meetings, and consulting with subject librarians.

I also want to mention the relationship building over the years between libraries and people in departments that laid the foundation for this collaboration. Many people beyond the three of us had a part in making this change happen, and will continue to influence the goals of this project going forward.

Jeni is going to go into more detail on the project workflow.

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Fields in Alma and Primo

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What is what?

How/where does information translate from Alma to Primo?
What fields are available to us?

How should we utilize the fields available to us?

How are we currently utilizing the fields?
Which fields should we use?
What information should go in each field?

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Walkthrough of public display fields

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Field mapping with examples from UC Davis and UC Irvine

Most of us outside of Technical Services just called the link that you click to access the resource the "resource link," which is not technically inaccurate, but we learned that it is called the Electronic Collection Public Name (or override) in Alma. For Phase 1 of this project, we chose to focus on those two fields, only, but there are several other text lines that can be displayed beneath the link: Access Model, Public Note (which I believe you can have multiples of!), Coverage Information Combined, and Authentication Note. The Criminal Justice Database image here shows an instance where the Authentication and Public Note fields express redundant information! You can see why there is a lot of room for both confusion and improvement, but we chose to worry about the other fields in Phase 2.

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Audience considerations

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Why not just, "View Resource"?

How much detail do we need to provide? (e.g., eBook vs. Reference eBook)

Remain consistent with platform name, but provide package name where valuable to audience.

Next and perhaps most importantly, we had to consider who our audience is. Initially, we thought just patrons/users. However, we realized that many of our librarians use Primo more than or instead of Alma. When it came down to more detailed spelling and grammatical decisions, we also had to consider vendor and our own internal communications brand and style guidelines.

Here are some examples of the decisions we had to make. One of the first thoughts that came to our minds was, 'why not just make it easy and make all the links say something general like, "View Resource"?' If you're considering the average student, they probably don't really care whether the title is coming from EBSCO or JSTOR...or do they? We realized that for titles where we have access through multiple platforms, it's already confusing because which link should a user select? But it would be even more confounding if you saw 8 "View Resource" links back to back on the same page and "View Resource" is not best practice for accessibility descriptive link text guidelines. Also, some of our more discerning users have platform preferences, so they might prefer to see that they can access the resource through JSTOR rather than EBSCO (or vice versa) when available.

Our other important audience is librarians. Again, students probably don't care whether it says, "Oxford eBooks" vs. "Oxford Reference eBooks," but this is a helpful distinction for our selectors. We definitely knew we wanted to prioritize platform name in the link, but there were instances where it was helpful to the librarian to see the package name within the platform. One example was the "Black Studies in Video" package. For consistency, we needed to override this with the vendor/platform name, but the selector asked that we maintain the package name. We had to come up with a standard format in cases where both vendor/platform and package name need to be displayed.�

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Stakeholders

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Who uses these fields on the Alma side?

Acquisitions
Technical Services
Other staff who prefer Alma to Primo

What workflows will be impacted if we make changes?

Finally, we wanted to be considerate of internal stakeholders who may be affected if we make changes. Since we are only asking to modify the override field, we were assured that the original data in the Public Name field which is used by Acquisitions, Technical Services, and other staff who prefer to work in Alma, would remain unchanged. If anything, adding the override name might improve findability of the collections in Alma. So we were satisfied that it would have no negative effects on other teams and workflows. We had run an Analytics report with all of the current Public Name and override names and added a column to reflect our proposed new name and we were ready to pass the baton to Technical Services and Evelyn to execute the actual changes. So now I'll turn it over to Maricar to explain how they completed their portion of the project.

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Information Technical Services Needed from Collection Services

Collection ID number

Proposed collection name display change

Name of library that manages collection (University vs. Law)

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Collaboration and Implementation

Thanks, Jeni! I'll now walk through the process of updating collection display names in Alma so they appear as desired to our users in Primo. To make these changes, Technical Services needed three pieces of information from Collection Services.

First, we needed to know the collection ID number. This ID number identifies a specific collection, and distinguishes this collection from others on the same platform. In this example on the right-hand side, the red brackets highlight the 3 collection ID numbers for the Stanford, University of Chicago, and Yale University Press collections on the De Gruyter platform.

Second, we needed the new collection name that we wanted to display to our users in the discovery layer.

Finally, we needed the name of the library that managed the collection. At UC Irvine, this helped differentiate the larger UC Irvine Libraries collections from the UC Irvine Law Library collections. This helped direct staff to only make name changes to collections relevant to their library and users.

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Editing Collection Public Display Name in Alma

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How Edits Display in Catalog to Library Users

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Next steps

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Continue to refine remaining non-standard link text.
Work is ongoing as new packages are added.
Collaborate with UX/UA Librarian and communications department.
Create guidelines for additional public-facing fields (Phase 2):

Authentication Notes
Public Notes
Access model

Thanks, Maricar! As for next steps, we still find links that don't conform to the standards as evidenced in the slide image, so we'll need to continue refining those. This work will always be ongoing as we purchase new packages and onboard new vendors. Also, our website is going through a major redesign at the moment, so we may need to reconsider some of the rules we've already created as we collaborate with our UX/UA Librarian and library communications department on the redesign. One thing for certain is continuing with Phase 2 of the project where we intend to reassess and standardize our use of the other fields mentioned. We don't currently use the Access model field and if we decide to, we need to figure out whether we would be now triplicating data currently stored in other fields. As individual institutions, we are likely all in too deep with Alma to expect standardization across the board, but we hope that our project inspires other institutions to take a look at their own naming conventions and are certainly open to future collaboration! Thank you for joining us!