Deleting Network Zone Records Without Inventory from an IZ

Background

The Alma August 2016 release list of resolved issues indicates that any operator with the Cataloger Extended role may delete an NZ bibliographic record that has no inventory or orders attached to it. (The resolved issues were cases opened by other consortia). After some brief preliminary testing in the Sandboxes by multiple parties and institutions, it was found that one can delete bibs without inventory from the Network Zone, including those bibs that are linked to bound-with titles in a local IZ.

This policy is to ensure operators working in an Institution Zone do not delete Network Zone records that appear to be without inventory, but in fact may be linked to bound-with titles in a local IZ.

Policy Statement

Operators should NOT utilize the feature (i.e., to delete a Network Zone record without inventory while logged in to the Institution Zone) at this time and continue to report NZ deletes to the identified NZ administrator. [To be determined.]

Best practice recommendations:

Operators should not delete Network Zone records that appear to be without inventory for the following reasons:

1. A bibliographic record may appear as without inventory in the NZ but is there because it is linked to a bound-with record in a local IZ. It appears that deleting the bibliographic record in the NZ will also delete the bibliographic record for the bound-with record in the local IZ.

   
   

2. Bibliographic records that appear as without inventory in the NZ may still have holdings attached in OCLC. If the OCLC record is updated (but the OCLC holdings aren’t removed), then the record will come back down into the NZ again.

More testing needs to be done, and procedures developed, before we can devolve deletion of NZ bibs to individual institutions.

Note: Operators who open an NZ bibliographic record in the MD Editor in order to copy an NZ record to the IZ (File > Copy to catalog) should exercise caution when clicking on ‘Copy to catalog’, as the ‘Delete Record’ command is directly above ‘Copy to catalog’. Please ensure you do not select ‘Delete record’ by mistake!

It is our understanding that Ex Libris is to complete development of a batch tool that will allow libraries to delete bibliographic records without inventory and  will avoid compromising NZ bibliographic records that are in a bound-with relationship. The batch tool will ensure that child records in a bound-with relationship will be treated as if they have inventory attached and will therefore not be included in the set of “unused” NZ bib records eligible for deletion.

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