Add option to control the visibility of collections in Primo and Collections Lobby
Give customers the option to control the visibility of individual collections in Primo and on the Collections Lobby page.
Use case: Our institution would like to have a limited number of centrally curated and managed collections that can be viewed in the Collections Lobby. But we would also like to give librarians the option to create their own collections for special projects, exhibits, or courses, which would not be displayed in the Lobby but could still be made accessible via direct link. Ideally, this could be achieved by adding checkboxes to the Collection Editor page - one controlling the collection's visibility in Primo and another controlling its visibility in the Collections Lobby.
Joseph Deodato
shared this idea
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Manu Schwendener commented
> addition of a visibility checkbox or toggle
What certainly is missing is the option to toggle visible / invisible from the Manage Collections page!
And come to think of it, I wouldn't really mind if collections that are not visible in Primo (= not in the collection lobby and not showing the path in the details) could still be shown via a direct link.
It would be the same as 'unpublished' in other contexts (for example photo sharing sites): not findable, but everybody who knows the direct link can see the collection.
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> welcome any other workarounds
If you want, maybe also post in the Primo mailing group if others had a similar situation and how they solved it.
(Sorry if you already did this and I forgot.)
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Joseph Deodato
commented
Assuming the path could be set to not display for suppressed collections, I don't think this would cause confusion.
While there are other ways of achieving this, we think they could be made much simpler with the addition of a visibility checkbox or toggle. And since this solution already exists in other Ex Libris products like Esploro, we thought it would be easy enough to implement in Alma. That said, we appreciate the suggested workarounds and welcome any others.
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While I understand your wish, I have the feeling that this would be confusing for the patrons, because it would be inconsistent.
"Why am I seeing the path in the full record display, but can not find it via the collections page?"
I see two workarounds that would be less confusing, and exist already:
A) for your second case, use local fields instead of collections
B) for your second case, use an additional level in the collections. Call the top level something short (like 'others'?), in the description of the top level collection explain what's behind it.
Like this, you keep the Collections Lobby tidy / only show what you want to show there, but the behaviour of the subcollections within "others" is still consistent.