[Koha-devel] Hide records on Leader 05 = d in OPAC

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 8:44 PM, David Cook <dcook at prosentient.com.au> wrote:
> We can’t necessarily rely on all Koha instances running this cronjob, nor
> can we rely on the frequency. Shouldn’t we be hiding these records from the
> OPAC as soon as they’re marked as “deleted”?
>
> I’ve opened a bug for this purpose:
> http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=15537

I am in mild disfavor of this proposal, particularly as implemented in
current patch. Using a cronjob to delete records where Leader/05 is
set to 'd' is useful when the library has arranged their workflow such
that they *know* that Leader/05 = 'd' is being used consistently to
signify that a record is no longer wanted. However, for a library that
has not hitherto cared about the values in that position,
unconditionally suppressing the display of such records could come as
an unwelcome surprise.

That said, it is also a reasonable choice for a library to want to use
the Leader/05 as suppression criterion.  Consequently, I suggest
adding a configuration option.  For that matter, making it
configurable (say, by allowing the library to specify a set of query
additions for the purpose of filtering records from public display)
could result in a more generally useful mechanism.

> I admit that I have a special interest in this where I might
> be overlaying existing records using a mostly empty skeleton
>  record generated from an OAI-PMH identifier and a OAI-PMH
> deleted status (OAI-PMH doesn’t send metadata for deleted records).
>  I’d match the existing record in Koha using the identifier, and
> then set LDR05 to “d” in accordance with the OAI-PMH deleted
> status. Then, that record would disappear from the OPAC, so that
> end users don’t see this skeleton record.

I do not find this a compelling use case as stated.  If the goal is to
allow harvesting and overlay records from an OAI-PMH provider to also
delete bibs from a Koha database... coding so that the records are
*actually* deleted seems more direct.

Regards,

Galen
-- 
Galen Charlton
Infrastructure and Added Services Manager
Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts
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