Re: [Koha-devel] Deleting MARC items

[Chris Cormack]

Hi Guys

On Tue, Jun 03, 2003 at 10:03:43AM -0400, Owen Leonard said:
> 
> > >Is there a way to delete items from a MARC 
> > biblio record besides going into 
> > >MySQL and doing it by hand?
> 
> > that's a good question : should we enable 
> > biblio/items deletion. I think 
> > that no : if an item has to be "deleted", just 
> > mark it as "unborrowable", but remember we had it some times 
> > ago.
> 
> I'm very confused now.  Is the 'deletedbiblioitems' table used?  And what 
> about 
> the 'withdrawn' status in the 'items' table? How is that used?

Ok, answering from 1.2.x :-) 
When you delete and item/biblioitem/biblio in 1.2.3 it is shifted to the
deleteditem, deletedbiblio etc.
This is so that they dont clutter up searching etc.
If you mark an item cancelled/withdraw the withdrawn status is invoke. Koha
knows not to show these items to patrons. Librarians can see them still tho.
What HLT is cancel books, then after some period of time, delete them.

They also delete items that have been lost for a certain amount of time, and
have been replaced.
> 
> My concern about marking items as 'deleted' and 'unborrowable' is that it 
> would 
> fill up the database with entries that would need to be ignored in most 
> searches.
>  
Yep, thats what the deleted tables are there to prevent.
Im fairly sure the same system will be working in 1.9.3 but i dont know what
it would do with the MARC data.

> > If yes : I think it's a very uncommon operation 
> > that should be hidden in 
> > the "parameter" part of Koha. If we delete a 
> > biblio/item, should we 
> > delete all borrowing informations too?
> 
> It's very common for us to delete items.  We weed our collections regularly.  
> Items with shorter lifespans like paperback romances get deleted fairly 
> frequently.  Some mechanism needs to be available to librarians for getting 
> them out of the publicly-searched pool of items.
> 
I think HLT do a yearly stocktake and delete items then.
So I think its not a truly uncommon instance in a public library.

Chris
-- 
Chris Cormack                                                     Programmer
027 4500 789                                       Katipo Communications Ltd
address@hidden                                          www.katipo.co.nz