Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Behind the Scenes of Discarding

When you discard an item, you check it out to your agency's discard account (HUMDISCARD, PWSDISCARD, etc.). The item is still in our catalog, but items that are checked out to a DISCARD account have a current location of DISCARD (instead of CHECKEDOUT). This current location is set to be shadowed (or not viewable) on the public catalog. Holds cannot be placed on these items as well.

While these items have been checked out to a discard account, we have not "really" discarded them. Therefore, once a week on Saturday, reports run which convert all items checked out to a discard account. These items are then "officially" set to a discard status. But that is not all.

Another report runs, also on Saturday after all of the Discard Convert reports. This is the "Discard Remove" report. It removes all discarded items from the catalog and produces a list of those items. Items that have bills associated with them are not removed. That is why you will still see quite a few "discard" items in our catalog.

Once a quarter, I take these weekly discard reports and perform a multi-step process in order to create a list of deleted items that we can use to update our holdings with OCLC.

No comments: