If it is desirable to suppress records from any applications that search via the Codex, it will be necessary to record a suppression/do not display status in the Codex records.
What are the use cases for suppressing records? E.g. – public vs. staff, title vs. holdings/item, etc.
I wouldn’t like to see records/resources suppressed from display in the Codex, even when they should be suppressed from public display for the purposes of discovery layers. So, not suppressing records from staff, but indicating somehow in the Codex that a record has been suppressed from public display at the source for the instance data; i.e.: the record’s holding or bibliographic record was set to a suppressed from public view state.
Hi Jacquie - that makes sense to me. Why would you ever want to suppress a record from the Codex? I can see wanting to mark them as suppressed from public display, or being able to mark them as withdrawn/lost - but completely suppress them from Codex? Might as well delete them then, since how would you be able to find them if they were suppressed from the Codex?
In Voyager, you could staff suppress records, with a toggle to view
those suppressed recordist desired.
I believe that this was implemented to reduce some of the “noise” of
records that represented item no longer held, but not able to be
deleted…and there were lots of reasons for lots of those.
As I thought about potential metadata elements, I wanted to make sure
that we considered the ongoing need for this sort of functionality.
I guess from the implementation perspective the things I would bear in mind are:
If these two assertions are right, then it seems like we shouldn’t preclude the ability to hide records, either permanently, or temporarily whilst they are repaired. That said, I think the ability to hide records in this way might be a bit down the priority list? So - as long as we are mindful of the fact we might want to do this, and we don’t deliberately preclude it I think we are OK?
Hi Ann-Marie,
We suppress things from staff indexes all the time, like Kathryn mentions. This we’ve withdrawn, but we need to retain the order records for come to mind. Also, if we suppress things from the Codex, that will not make them completely unfindable, right? Since each module will have a search interface, or that is what I understood from our last MM SIG meeting.
I would really like to see a use case for this. I’m generally leery of suppressing information, but I also think others have a good point that this information would not be completely suppressed as it would still be visible elsewhere (e.g. the Acquisitions module).
If my memory serves (it’s been awhile), the staff suppress in Voyager
was optional – you could search only unsuppressed records or all
records, suppressed or not. I agree that suppressing with no way of
ever seeing the record again is problematic.
Sounds like we are considering whether a title should be suppressed from staff view if it no longer serves much purpose, but still needs to exist for some reason. E.g., a title was ordered but the order canceled for whatever reason? Do you want to keep in your system or delete entirely? If you want to keep track of the order for audit information, it might be nice to have an ability to not have those results show up in your searches, or to have a facet where you could filter those out. That said, it still seems like a “staff-only” flag might be sufficient to hold these kinds of use cases and have them filtered out from view as appropriate.
I like the idea of all being retrieved in the Codex, but being able to have a filter (and a default setting) that allows you to retrieve or ignore “suppressed” items. I’m still not quite convinced that there’s a need to completely suppress codex records, but so long as you can still get to them somehow or another, then it may just be a terminology/mindset issue.