Integrate Perlego's catalogue with your library discovery service

This article provides an overview of how you can make Perlego’s catalogue available to library discovery services, so you can expose our content in your library services.

Table of contents

1. What is a discovery service?
2. Who do Perlego partner with?
3. How does this help me?
4. How do I set up the integration?
5. What content is shared?
6. FAQs
   1. What does the Perlego 'full collection' mean?
   2. We have agreed specific content will be made available to our institution via Perlego. Will that appear?
   3. Not all content is relevant to me. How can I utilise this collection?

Make your Perlego collection discoverable through your Library Management System or discovery service. With a collection of over 1 million books, and new titles constantly being added, keeping your library up-to-date with your Perlego collection can be challenging. We partner with key library system providers to make this process easy for you.

Read this article to find out who we partner with, and how regularly they update our collection.

What is a discovery service?

A discovery service is a digital tool that enables users to seamlessly search across all library resources through a single search function. This allows library users to find content available to them across multiple library sources. Making it easy for your users to discover books available to them on Perlego through your central library system.

Who do Perlego partner with?

Perlego partners with all the major Library Service providers. Our content is shared to central discovery systems for easy administration and deployment.

We send our updated catalogue to our partners on a monthly basis.

Find out more about KBART and MARC formats.

How does this help me?

Our partnerships with these providers helps by:

• Automatically making content updates for new, or deactivated titles.
• Updating metadata as we receive additional enrichments from publishers.

How do I set up the integration?

There's nothing you need to set up within Perlego, however you will need to have a subscription to one of the provider platforms we partner with.

We recommend setting up Automatic Account Creation in your Perlego account when adding our collections to your library platforms. This is to ensure that when your users try to access content, they are able to sign up within your Perlego organisation with their organisation email address.

If you do not do this, when users follow a book link from your discovery service we will have no way to identify if they are from your organisation. This could lead to them creating a personal Perlego account by mistake.

What content is shared? 

We share a catalogue of all books on our universal access model available to organisation subscriptions. The full collection is not specific to your organisation, and you may sometimes find titles missing from the collection compared to your Perlego library or titles that are not available to you when the book link is opened.

Reasons for missing titles

• Our global collection does not include any books that have been purchased or specifically added to your Perlego library based on one-off publisher agreements.
• New books have been added to the Perlego catalogue since the provider last updated the Perlego collection in their community zone or collection manager.
• They have been soft-withdrawn. These titles remain available to existing organisations that had access, but are not available to new organisations that subscribe to Perlego.

Reasons for unavailable titles

• The title is not available in your region, as some titles in our collection do not have global access rights.
• The title has been withdrawn by a publisher since the provider last updated the Perlego collection in their community zone or collection manager.

FAQs

What does the Perlego ‘full collection’ mean?

Perlego works with Universities and organisations across the world, alongside our ‘direct to consumer’ subscription offering. We also work with over 9000 publishers to build up our collection of over 1 million books.

Some books have restrictions in place, meaning they are only available in certain geographic regions. This may result in books showing as ‘unavailable’ in your region.

Our ‘full collection’ in this context, means all books that are licensed to Perlego for sale to Universities as part of our ‘business to business’ (B2B) offering.

This does mean that some content will not be available to your institution due to geographic restrictions. You can download your organisation specific catalogue from the Subscription Manager.

We have agreed specific content will be made available to our institution via Perlego. Will that appear?

If you have a ‘custom collection’ through Perlego this content will not be available via these provider platforms by default. You’ll need to add these books to your library systems manually.

Not all content is relevant to me. How can I utilise this collection?

Dependent on your library system of choice, you should have the ability to select either the full collection to be placed within your library systems, or select specific content to add to your local collection.