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Going Through Withdrawal (Without Too Much Suffering)

Carrie Roberts Margaret Corby

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Background

Fire on May 22, 2018

Substantial smoke and water damage

All items removed and cleaned

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Background

Unique opportunity for

Inventory
Collection assessment

Task force decisions

Return to Hale
Transfer to Annex
Deselection

Wait to remove Alma records until project end

Because we were handling every single item, it was decided that we would use this opportunity to undertake a comprehensive inventory and evaluation of the physical collections. An inventory and weeding project on this scale had not been done before.
A task force was organized to make collection decisions regarding what would be returned to Hale, what would be transferred to our off-site high-density storage annex, and what would no longer be retained. The Task force used reports generated from OCLC’s Greenglass product.
We used Grima to populate these decisions into item records as Statistical Notes and to create item records for titles without items.
We decided that removing the deselected records from Alma would be handled at the end of the project, after all items had been physically sorted and placed according to the task force decisions.

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WITHDRAW library

Suppressed from the public

24 locations reflecting items’ original locations

main 🡪 wdmain

At start of withdrawal, held:

341,856 titles
406,344 items

Total physical holdings at time of fire?

≈ 1.5 million

The records for items identified for deselection, as well as those marked as missing or lost, were transferred to a special library location, the WITHDRAW library, created in Alma for this project.
The WITHDRAW library was suppressed from the public to avoid confusion among patrons and ILL. Suppressing the entire library allowed us to manipulate titles and holdings without the need to suppress indivially – This was a good decision for us
It contained 24 locations, mirroring the locations in Alma where the items lived before the fire. For example, items from the location “main” were moved to “wdmain” in the WITHDRAW library.
By the time we were ready to complete the withdrawals in Alma, the WITHDRAW library held just over 340,000 titles with 406,000 items. For reference, our total physical holdings at the time of the fire were around 1.5 million, so we were effectively removing roughly 1/5 of our physical materials.

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5 years later . . .

All physical items have been processed

Time to clean up!

How do we even do this?

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Challenges

Bound-withs
Incomplete multi-volume/multi-copy withdrawals
Analyzed and partially analyzed titles (maintaining set records)
Titles with attached purchase information that we needed to retain
Titles with attached electronic access that we needed to retain
Deleting OCLC holdings

Here are some of the challenges we knew we would have to deal with at the outset:
Bound-withs

Because retention decisions had been populated through item records, they were present in the parent records but not the child/related records. This had an extra wrinkle in that we were still cleaning up Host Bibliographic records from when we migrated to Alma.

Multi-volume/copy, analyzed and partially analyzed

making sure that when we were done Alma accurately reflected what had been retained.

Retaining titles with attached purchase information

Local practice, meant that we had to handle these differently than items without purchase orders

Electronic access

Mainly hybrid gov docs

OCLC holdings

Batch deletion of OCLC holdings is not complicated, but keeping track of which titles to remove holdings from needed to be built into our process

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Tools Used

Notepad ++

Alma Advanced Search

Alma analytics

Excel

MarcEdit

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Alma Advanced Search

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Bound-with titles: Filtering a logical set

Indication rule to identify bibs with 774 fields

Filter Physical Titles set using rule

Resulting itemized set could be exported using “Export Bibliographic Records” job

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Bound-with titles: MarcEdit

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Bound-with titles: Notepad++

Remove quotation marks

Find = “
Replace = [blank]

Move each MMS id to its own line

Find = ;
Replace = \n

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Bound-with titles: Back in Alma

Use list of MMS ids to create an itemized set from file
Export members of new set as an Excel file
Review set contents for purchase orders or additional vols/copies, and deal with them individually
Any titles not withdrawn need to be removed from the Excel file in order to retain those OCLC holdings

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Bound-with titles: Finishing up

Performed batch delete of OCLC holdings
Ran job “Delete Bibliographic Record”

Used this job because these do not have item records

Repeated process for parent records from filtered set

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Multi-vol/Multi-copy: Alma Analytics

List of MMS ids from Excel file of Physical Titles set
Alma Analytics report filters for:

Titles with >1 copy
Titles with >1 holdings location

Handled individually to correct remaining holdings

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Multi-vol/Multi-copy: Alma Analytics

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Analyzed titles:

Tried to handle all analyzed titles separately
Specifically looking for bibs

Analyzed set bibs without items
Presence of series
In the Availability column, looked for presence of enumeration included in call number

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Purchase Orders

From our Physical Titles advanced search

Exported the results into an Excel file
Filtered "Orders" column for titles with purchase orders

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Purchase Orders

Return to the logical Physical Titles set
Modify this set to become a Physical Items set
Export results to Excel.
Pull the item barcodes from this new spreadsheet and use the barcodes to create an itemized Physical Items set, because the Change Holdings job cannot be used on a physical title set

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Purchase Orders

Ran "Change Holding Information" job on Items set

Used a normalization rule to strip call number and add note: $x “withdrawn mm/yyyy”

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Purchase Orders

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Purchase Orders

Ran "Withdraw Physical Items" job on Items set

Deleted the items
Used option to suppress the bib and holdings records

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Attached electronic access

Government document bibs created by GPO are often hybrid bibs with one bib for print, microforms and/or online
Used an advanced Alma search to pull selected call number stems
Used the Alma export to get a list of MMS IDs
Created new itemized “All titles” set

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Attached electronic access

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OCLC holdings

At this stage, we have handled all challenging titles
Returned to the logical set and reviewed one last time
Next step is to prepare for batch delete of bibs and OCLC holdings

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OCLC Holdings

Ran the "Withdraw Physical Items" job to delete the items, holdings and bib records
But first, we ran a batch job in OCLC Connexion to delete our holdings in OCLC

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OCLC Holdings

Physical Titles set Excel file

At this point should contain information for only titles that have been deleted or suppressed
Copy “Record number” column, paste in new .txt file, and save

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OCLC Holdings: RegEx in Notepad++

From this:

To this:

Regular Expressions in Notepad++ For cleaning up list of OCLC numbers.docx

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OCLC Holdings

In Connexion, ran resulting list of numbers through:

Batch >
Holdings by OCLC number >
Delete Holdings

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Alma Jobs

Export Bibliographic records
Change Holdings Information
Delete Bibliographic records
Withdraw Physical items

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Tips and tricks

When exporting a large results list from Alma Advanced search

Open 2 versions of Alma

Creating a tab delimited file in MarcEdit

Save your settings

Three people worked on this project, we all did things a bit differently – document what you are doing, and why

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Thank you!

Questions?

Margaret Corby mcorby@ksu.edu

Carrie Roberts clh8888@ksu.edu