If your plans include using any batch processes for removing lost items records, please consider first removing titles that are suppressed with an Item Process Status of “LO” or “LP.” We can use a batch process with titles.

We can use a batch process for items if and only if we have first removed the titles.

If a title has more than one item, and all of the items are suppressed (Aleph Item Process Status = LO, LP, SU, WD, or CA), the title will be suppressed. We can safely remove these in batch by tagging the Bibliographic records with STA=OLSDELETE. (This suppresses titles, and at the start of the next month completely removes those records, after withdrawing your library’s holdings from OCLC for that title.)

If we have run this batch process, we know that the remaining LO and LP items are on titles where the bibliographic record has at least one active item remaining. This means we can safely use the batch process to remove these items. This batch process removes the items and, if there are no items remaining on the holdings, it also removes the holdings record. If there are no holdings left for the title, it removes the Bibliographic record.

The dangers come from three potential issues.

If we just remove items, holdings and the bibliographic record, without removing the holdings from OCLC, we do not know anything more about the deleted title. We do not know which holdings to unset. This is not a concern IF we have first used STA=OLSDELETE.

A second danger would be IF the item record is not linked to a holdings record, it will not know which holdings record to remove. However, we can identify those unlinked items as the Holdings number will appear in our custom listings as ‘000000000CUN60.’ (Since we recently ran a fix for holdings records, we are down to roughly 60K items not linked to holdings across CUNY; a third of those are at a single institution.) These small numbers of items can be easily handled in advance.

Looking at a listing (for your library) of all items currently on loan but never returned by patrons, we see that none of them have an Item Process Status for suppressed, lost, not returned, or missing. These items are not misplaced, and instead have a loan status of ‘Not returned by patron.’ These items are not suppressed, and neither are their titles. Please do not assume these might be lost by batch removals when done properly by a trained Aleph Admin.