[Wactclc-alma] question about deleting vs withdrawing

[Ventura, Gerie]

You're the best, Kirsti Thomas! Happy New Year.     Thanks, Gerie





From: Wactclc-alma [mailto:wactclc-alma-bounces at lists.ctc.edu] On Behalf Of Thomas, Kirsti
Sent: Thursday, January 04, 2018 2:22 PM
To: WACTCLC Alma Discussion <wactclc-alma at lists.ctc.edu>
Subject: Re: [Wactclc-alma] question about deleting vs withdrawing

Amy,

>From what I've pieced together, deleting and withdrawing are the same thing in Alma.  When you get rid of a bib/holding/item record, Alma doesn't seem to remove it from the system entirely.  Instead, it's more like Alma flags the record in such a way that it's not visible in the Alma user interface anymore.  The data for the record is still on the servers (I think?) and all the data that was reportable in Analytics before the record was deleted/withdrawn is still there after the record gets deleted/withdrawn.  I have a colleague at another institution whose student worker accidentally deleted a bunch of bibs/items and I think Ex Libris was able to restore everything because the data isn't really deleted, just hidden.

When you withdraw items, either one at a time or in batch, you get prompted on whether or not you want to delete attached bibs and holdings if the item you're withdrawing is the last copy.

Records that have been deleted/withdrawn in Alma are flagged in Analytics an "Inactive."  Records that haven't been deleted/withdrawn in Alma are flagged in Analytics as "Active."  I recently had a call with Ex Libris where they reminded me to start including the Active/Inactive flag in my Analytics reports.  We only started withdrawing items in Alma a month or two ago, so for a while everything in our system was "Active" and I didn't have to worry about it.

Alma doesn't make a distinction between deleting something because you made a mistake and added it in error, and withdrawing something that was part of the library collection.  We modified a procedure from University of Portland to add a statistics note to things that we're withdrawing so that we can make that distinction in our own statistics.  The note we add specifies whether the withdrawn item was damaged, lost, weeded, returned to the owning instructor, etc.  This way we can keep better track of why we're withdrawing things.  I've got our step-by-step instructions in a Word document in Google Drive if anyone is interested:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=12Yro4DQUYS8xW74Ms9BRmwZCenaYgAF7


It will be ok!

Kirsti S. Thomas
Library Technical Services Manager
Seattle Colleges
kirsti.thomas at seattlecolleges.edu<mailto:kirsti.thomas at seattlecolleges.edu>



From: Wactclc-alma [mailto:wactclc-alma-bounces at lists.ctc.edu] On Behalf Of Herman, Amy
Sent: Thursday, January 04, 2018 11:03
To: WACTCLC Alma Discussion <wactclc-alma at lists.ctc.edu<mailto:wactclc-alma at lists.ctc.edu>>
Subject: [Wactclc-alma] question about deleting vs withdrawing

We are removing a book off course reserve that is the personal copy of an instructor, and sending it back to her.  Should we delete the record, or just withdraw?  We will never need this book again so it would seem we could delete the record, but will we lose usage data?  I thought I remembered something about still being able to access deleted item data in analytics... if so, which data are stored for deleted records?

Thanks!

Amy Herman
Library Faculty | Olympic College
1600 Chester Avenue | Bremerton, WA 98337
aherman at olympic.edu<mailto:aherman at olympic.edu> | 360-475-7256



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