Salutations, and Welcome Back to the Monday 'Minder!

It has been almost exactly 1 year--363 days--since the last Monday 'Minder! Today's issue is inspired by the questions: What is the difference between Discard and Withdrawn in Workflows? and, What are these new item statuses I'm seeing--like AVAIL_SOON, DISCARD2, WITHDRAWN2?

Short answer: DISCARD means the item is ready to be purged from the database.  WITHDRAWN means the library has checked the item out to the WITHDRAWN user in preparation for it to be purged. AVAIL_SOON is a result of the new Acquisitions procedures used by OPL, WCTS, and soon MPL that means the ordered item has been received, is in process, and will be available soon.  

More details (& Excel Tip).....When a new item is "received" in Acquisitions, be it in Symphony (OPL, MPL) or BLUEcloud(WCTS), it automatically creates a new item with a Current Location of AVAIL_SOON (which appears as "Available Soon" in the catalog).  However, it leaves behind a phantom ON-ORDER item that needs to get purged eventually.   Remember this, we'll come back to it later....

Originally, WITHDRAWN items were left visible in the public catalog so that patrons could place holds and libraries would know to re-order the items.  However, in 2020 the decision was made to stop displaying Withdrawn items. Why? Because a) most WD items were deliberately removed--why would the library re-order it? and b) patrons' holds on these items were probably never going to be filled, and if there are holds on an item, it can't be purged. 

Locations need to be set "shadowed" when they are created in order to make them invisible to patrons, and the original WITHDRAWN Location was not set shadowed. Therefore I needed to create a new Location of WITHDRAWN2 which was shadowed. So, now, when a library checks out to their WD user, it appears in WorkFlows as WITHDRAWN2 and doesn't appear to the patron at all.  

Every quarter or so, I run a report that finds all the items checkedout to all the libraries' WD users, discharges them, and moves them to a Current Location of DISCARD. Later that night, I run the report that purges items with a Current Location of DISCARD from the database. Did I mention that I can't purge items if there are holds on them? 

DISCARD2 is similar. The original DISCARD Location was not shadowed because items were in that location only for a very short period of time(from hours up to 2 days). Remember the phantom items I mentioned that were created in the new Acquisitions process? They need to be purged, but they hang around for a long time and they aren't real physical items that can be scanned like one does to checkout to the WD user.  It might be OK for WCTS' phantoms to appear for a while because there's a good chance that there might still be copies being added for other libraries. However, we definitely don't want OPL (and eventually MPL's) phantoms displaying to the public! Hence I had to create a DISCARD2.

Clear as mud? 

Excel tip: If your spreadsheet has many tabs, you can jump directly to any tab by right-clicking on the arrows in the lower left corner of Excel and choosing the name of the tab you want: