P2E in a Consortium: One Simple Trick to Remove Unwanted Electronic Portfolios!

Abstract

After sharing a single Aleph database for over twenty years, the University System of Maryland & Affiliated Institutions (USMAI) consortium migrated to seventeen Alma Institution Zones (IZs) with a Network Zone (NZ) in 2024. Having once used the "single record approach" to add physical and e-holdings to the same bibliographic record, we found our legacy data was ill-suited for Ex Libris' standard Physical to Electronic (P2E) process of migrating ILS data for e-resources. As designed, if any institution had e-holdings on an Aleph record, then every institution with physical holdings on the same record would get an electronic portfolio for that title in their Alma IZ. Pre-migration cleanup was not feasible, and post-migration cleanup would have been difficult in Alma. The presentation will describe some challenges of P2E and how we discovered that a simple Linux command could prevent these errant portfolios in Alma.