Leganto: Supporting Lists with Multiple Course Codes

In August 2023 ExLibris released a new feature to Alma and Leganto providing greater support for users with reading lists containing multiple course codes. This article will describe how this integration works on the DCS. Before reading this article, we'd recommend reading the section titled UK Digital Content Store (DCS) Support for Lists Linked to Multiple Courses from the ExLibris Knowledge Center.

How does this work? 

On Alma/Leganto, it is possible to have multiple courses linked to the same reading list. However, on the DCS we treat each course as distinct since we need to know the student numbers for each individual course for reporting purposes. 

To make the workflow easier for users, when a Leganto/ExLibris user requests a digitisation from the DCS for a reading list with multiple course codes, an individual request is created on the DCS for each course code associated with that list. 

For example, say you have a Leganto reading list with two courses linked to it. Let's call these courses ABC123 and ABC456. When a new digitisation is submitted to the DCS from this reading list, two requests are created in the DCS, one for ABC123 and the other for ABC456.

Once you have generated content links for both of these requests the citation information on Alma will update. If you have only generated one content link the information on Alma will not update.

What do students see?

The DCS link that students see will depend on what course they are enrolled to on Alma. For example, a student who is registered to ABC123 but not ABC456 will see the DCS link associated with ABC123, and vice versa. This ensures that information in the Downloads per Content Item and HEI report on the DCS remains accurate. 

How does this work? 

There are two pieces of information that allow this to work: 

1. DCS course unique identifier: Alma/Leganto gets a unique ID number for each DCS course which is then associated with each content link. 

2. LMS student information: when a student does access a citation on the course, they are enrolled on is included in the LTI parameters. 

Together, these two pieces of information allow Leganto/Alma to know what course a student is enrolled on and what DCS content link they should be seeing. This means that students will only see the content link for the course that they are enrolled on when they go to click a link for a list with multiple course codes.