NERS 7820, open for voting now.

We just went live 3 weeks ago and this was one of the first, so far very few, negative comments we've received about Primo VE. One thing academics hate is when you take away a tool they find easy to use. Really hope to see this on the development roadmap.

My colleagues are shocked and dismayed to hear that this is a feature that is offered in Primo Back Office but NOT VE. We already are getting requests for this, and we just launched last month.

We recently moved to Primo VE and I am concerned that the A to Z browse feature is gone. Many times I come across the need for browsing journals within a letter range. Sometimes it's even just a message saying 'I know the journal started with the letter M". It's also a good visual tool when searching journals. For example, New York Times may have different entries depending on whether "The" is included.

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We went live with Primo VE in June 2021, and the lack of an A-Z browse on the Journal Search has been one of the most common complaints we've been hearing since then. The searching is pretty effective, in our testing, but users do seem to want an alphabetical browse option. It would be ideal to offer both the search and browse options, so users could choose the search option they prefer.

Users often like to see the options arrayed visually, rather than starting to type and only maybe being offered the autosuggest they'd like.
An autosuggest also constrains a user into typing, rather than clicking or tapping quickly.
We don't use Journal Search in Primo on Back Office, but we have Database Search active which has an A-Z. The use of this is high by the amount that it shows up on our Popular Searches results.
For example, in 2019 there were 3,857 clicks on "P", which is highly likely users quickly targeting to PubMed, as that is also our consistently most popular search. And "W" was 2,749 clicks, likely for Web of Science, and "S" was 2,331 likely for Scopus.
Perhaps we should consider, instead of deciding that we know better and telling users that the manner in which they want to search is old-fashioned, we should instead listen to the action of users and instead support them by offering both options?

The Mar 28, 2019 response from Ex Libris to this suggestion is disappointing. Notwithstanding the search-driven features of Primo VE, our users repeatedly ask for a pure, alphabetical browse of resources (and most often of e-journal titles specifically). They have been accustomed to A-Z browsing from previous OPACs and ERM portals and find the comprehensive results to be more inherently trustworthy than a search-driven result.

Having said the above, we welcome the planned browse by hierarchical categories for journal titles.

Primo VE offers an accurate auto-complete based on the journal titles held or subscribed by the university (a separate auto complete than Primo search). Instead of having the user click on a letter and get hundreds of journals in that letter they can start typing and get a much more relevant list. This was based on feedback from many customers that the A-Z is 'old fashioned' and not relevant in our days of many thousands of journals which is not usable for end users - and that an accurate auto complete would be more usable as they would start typing the 1st few letters of their journal and get their relevant journals.
The Primo VE Journal Search goes beyond the traditional link resolver journal search interfaces, offering both electronic and print journals making it the 1st true representation of all the journals an institutions holds or subscribes to (as opposed to just electronic before). Primo VE also offers a 'search within' feature that allows the user to search for articles in that are part of the journal they are interested in.

We do have plans in the roadmap to add browsing the journals by hierarchical categories as well.