Problem description

In a Network Zone consortium, bibliographic records are shared across all member institutions. Currently, the "Database" material type in Primo VE is assigned to a bibliographic record whenever that record is linked as the descriptive/display record for any Electronic Collection with a populated Level URL. This includes Local Electronic Collections created by a single member institution in their own Institution Zone.

Because the underlying bibliographic record is shared in the NZ, this single institution's local configuration choice changes the material type of the record for every institution in the consortium, even though only one institution actually intended the title to function as a database entry. This creates a situation where a shared title (e.g. a journal) can unexpectedly display under "databases" instead of its correct material type in another institution's discovery layer, with no clear explanation available to that institution.

Impact

Member institutions have no visibility or diagnostic tool to determine why a shared title unexpectedly displays with the wrong material type. A single institution's local Electronic Collection setup can silently override discovery behavior for the entire consortium, with no warning, log, or notification to affected institutions.

Troubleshooting is currently difficult. Only the consortium's network administrators have a way to identify the source, but it requires checking every library that has the record in their IZ.

Suggested improvement

We would like Clarivate to investigate ways of making this behavior more transparent and manageable in an NZ consortium setting. One option would be through better visibility into cross-institution record usage, or some form of notification when a shared record's material type is affected by another institution's configuration. An even better solution would be to change the underlying approach to how the "Database" resource type is determined for shared NZ records in a way that would let each IZ control the behaviour in their own IZ. Such a solution would increase the customizability of the database list for each individual IZ without risking resource type contamination across the consortia.