CUNY Aleph Catalog Optimization Projects: Suppressed Records

Bibliographic records suppressed for a variety of reasons:

• Item record of a withdrawn item deleted from Aleph
• Category of material (e.g., reference, periodicals, microforms) never had items—and they should be fixed by adding holdings/items
• Materials are withdrawn (not deleted) to preserve order/circulation history
• Records mistakenly brought over from OCLC that lack items
• Records where the orders were canceled and the items were never received
• Misplaced items eventually become tagged with IPS - LO (lost) or LP (Lost Paid)
• Bibliographic records where the items were removed (which also removes ALL circulation & order history for that item)

Suppressed bibliographic records generally fall into one of three categories. They may be:

• Title records which need items and holdings records added in order to preserve existing resources.
• Candidates for removal from the catalog (once Collection Development review is already complete)
• Titles retained as suppressed records for historical purposes.

Orders and subscriptions (for serials) can still be open with titles that have been discarded / weeded / suppressed. These can be either monographs or serials. These should be closed unless the titles are being deleted, or are a payment record.

For this project, an inventory of the suppressed items is needed for materials where there is any uncertainty about whether or not a library still has those materials. All institution reports of suppressed records have been posted below.

Methods to properly resolve suppressed records in Aleph fall into three phases:

1. Items can be found in your library and you intend to keep them
   Action: Either manually add an item and holdings record in Aleph or ask OLS to do it for you in batch. This will unsuppress the bib record.
   A recommended target completion date is April 15, 2019.
   Note: This first step should be given a significant priority, to be certain that your records are preserved and included in OCLC reclamation.
2. Items cannot be found and the library intends to delete the records from Aleph.
   Action: Either manually add STA=OLSDELETE to these bibliographic records on Aleph or submit a spreadsheet to OLS to globally add STA=OLSDELETE to these records. These records will be removed in batch.
   A recommended target completion date is July 1, 2019.
3. Item cannot be found and you want the Aleph records of these items to stay in the system and suppressed.
   Action: Either manually add a holdings and item records for each record on Aleph or ask OLS to globally add them for you.  A separate spreadsheet needs to be submitted to OLS for batch jobs. For payment records, it is possible to enter a note in the Item record Tab 2 Description indicating it is a payment record for identification purposes.
   A recommended target completion date is July 1, 2019.

For the action items described above, OLS needs separate sheets from you if you want OLS to do batch tasks for you. After each library has determined what to do with its currently suppressed items and deletion policy has been established, the list of currently suppressed records can be weeded (prior to migration).

Updated versions of these reports are available in Task Manager:

• XX_ttls_suppressed
• XX_ttls_hol_suppressed

If a library wants either of these reports re-ran, please submit a work order by emailing the CUNY Service Desk at service.desk@cuny.edu.