Salutations, and Happy Memorial Day!

Today's Topic: Spring Housecleaning! aka Database Maintenance

Just as one cleans out one's garden at certain times of the year, so I do periodic cleaning of our shared database. It is frustrating for patrons to see search results with copies that say "Withdrawn". Also, since WALS fees are based in part on the number of items and patrons each library has, and we take that snapshot in early June, I always make sure to to a thorough spring cleaning in May to clear out as many old, unused records as possible.  

The obvious ones to clean up are those items you all weeded. You check out weeded items to your WD-XX user (ex WD-PO, for PoySippi), and that changes the status (Current Location) to WITHDRAWN2 which patrons can't see in the catalog.  The next step is a report to move all those withdrawn items to a special, system-location of DISCARD.  As I said, those are the obvious ones, but there are a bunch more. For example...