Access Services Updates - July 29, 2019

Over the past several months, Risa Sargent has been working with Collection Services and Development (Pauline Rodriguez-Atkins and Janeal Walker), Access Services (Tricia Andrews), and IT (Anne Fischer) to identify the parameters to maintain our database of materials in CARL.X. After consulting with them and our data analyst (Jennifer Livingstone), we have identified when materials will be deleted from our database. The full plan is attached below, but the essentials are as follows:

• Once an item has been inactive for 2 years, it will be deleted.
• Inactive statuses include:
  • Damaged
  • Lost and Missing
  • Lost and Paid
  • Lost to Patron
  • Missing
  • Withdrawn
• Items that have fines on customer accounts or are charged as Lost to customers will be replaced with a Manual Fine. The item number will be in the notes field for the charge (see last page of attachment for screenshots). No current charges will be removed as part of this process.
• Once a Bibliographic record is empty and has been inactive for 2 years, it will be deleted.

Benefits of this process:

• It will be easier for staff to identify active copies that are available to customers.
• Fewer BID records will be in the system to sift through to find active copies of items.
• Location codes that are no longer used will be able to be deleted, reducing errors when changing item location codes.

This cleanup process will begin the second week of August. It will take most of August to run all of the initial deletions because we have 5 years of data clean up, and we don’t want to slow CARL.X down during normal daily use. Beginning in September, deletions will occur the first week of the month.