[Koha-devel] Please assist: auth values

[Paul A]

Please can one of you assist?

We are in the middle of shelving several hundred boxes of books, and seven 
volunteer cataloguers have spent the day editing items to change the auth 
value "loc" from "box_xyz" to the proper shelf/stack.

At the end of the day, an enthusiastic volunteer instead of deleting an 
empty box from the "loc" values, accidentally deleted our "rare book room" 
(my fault, I gave him superlibrarian credentials instead of doing the job 
myself.)

A search still finds: "628 result(s) found for 'mc-loc=2fl_rare' in NMA 
Catalog" but this is (I think) coming from somewhere other than items.location.

An sql query [SELECT * FROM authorised_values WHERE category='loc'] still 
finds the auth value: ...
1834 loc fl2_rare 2nd floor rare 2nd floor rare
...
so I can't "re-enter" the auth value which is no longer available for admin 
editing; so "editing" these 628 items is impossible. The OPAC is no longer 
showing the location at all.

The "catastrophe level" is that even if I revert to last nights backup, the 
volunteers tell me they have no way to pull them all (about 3,000 books) 
out and start over again.

Can anyone, pretty please, suggest a course of action?

Many thanks -- Paul