September 10, 2014

Deleting Holdings from the NHU-PAC

NHAIS libraries have always been responsible for deleting holdings from the NHU-PAC for any materials they no longer hold. Without an online holdings maintenance tool this process is going to be brought into NHAIS Services for the first time. Consequently, this procedure is somewhat experimental. We have tested this process and think that it will be manageable, but once we start getting requests from libraries for deletions we may find that some aspect of the process--either what libraries send us or what we do when we get it--may need to change.

Locate the bibliographic record you want and in the lower left column click on
"MARC Display" which will display the record with the "BIB#" in the upper right.
You can copy it ready for pasting from here. 

(DOUBLE CLICK THIS IMAGE TO ENLARGE IT.)


If you have holdings to be deleted from the NHU-PAC for your library here is what you need to do:
  1. Create a spreadsheet containing ONLY one sheet and a SINGLE column of data (without a header row). The data in that column will be the NHU-PAC bib number of the records you want your holding deleted from. The cells must be formatted as numbers with 0 decimal places.
  2. Save the spreadsheet as a csv file and name it CODEmmddyyyy.csv where CODE is your library's HSA code and the date is the day you are sending us the spreadsheet.
  3. Email the csv file as an attachment to nhu-pac@nh.gov with the subject "Deletions for CODE" (use your library's HSA code in place of CODE).
The FIRST TIME you send a file for deletions:
  1. Don't put more than 20 bib numbers in your file
  2. Indicate in the email what software you used to create the csv file (MSExcel, etc.)
  3. Wait until you get an email back from us indicating the file was correctly formatted before sending another one
Our plan is to process all the deletions we get over a period of time as a batch once a month. Initially we will probably process files more often (weekly?) to be sure we catch any problems as soon as possible and can modify the process if needed.

The process we will be using to delete holdings is an automated loading and item removal process and the format of the data being loaded must be exactly what the program expects so we will return files for reformatting if they aren't in the format we can load. After you have sent one file and heard back from us that it could be used you will be able to send csv files with as many deletions in them as you want.

January 2016 update: deletes will be processed in batches, probably quarterly. Files of bib numbers must be AT LEAST 100 numbers unless they are your library's first file (which will be a test batch of 20) or the file is a full year's worth of deletions and that was fewer than 100.
August 2017 update: email addresses were updated to reflect new NHSL addresses

2 comments:

  1. Hi Mary, thanks for the update. In Excel, there are three options for CSV files: Macintosh, ms-dos, and comma delimited. Do we need to choose a specific one of those, or will any do?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Good question: you want to choose CSV (comma delimited).

      Delete

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