Hello SWAN Members --

The Bibliographic and Member Services teams have had to make a change to the processing of discarded items that takes place each Saturday. Please familiarize yourself with the changes outlined below and let us know if you have any questions. Note that this change only affects our internal processing and the reports you will receive. You will still charge items to your DISCARD users per your usual procedures.

There are two separate reports that run to remove an item checked out to a DISCARD user:

1. Convert Discard -- The Convert Discard report first clears the checkout from the discard user and updates the location to DISCARD.
2. Remove Discard – The Remove Discard report removes the item.

We have been converting discarded items the same week they were checked out to the DISCARD user but delaying the removal of the item for 6 weeks to ensure they are counted in Circ Stats.

Both procedures cause the bib record to be re-indexed, which has been leading to very long run times for our Saturday night into Sunday morning maintenance reports. To solve this problem, we have decided to apply the same 6-week delay to the Convert Discard report, so items will be converted on the same day they are removed. This way, each bibliographic record will only be indexed once.

We have temporarily suspended the Convert Discard reports and will resume them once we reach the 6-week delay threshold. This will result in the following changes:

Larger numbers of items checked out to DISCARD users

DISCARD users will always contain a 6-week backlog of charged items. If you have very large weeding projects, you may see a slight delay when you enter your DISCARD user in the charge/checkout wizard. If you experience this, please let us know.

Count/List Discard BCA reports

These reports count, or list, items currently checked out to your DISCARD users. You have been advised to subscribe to these reports on a weekly basis because of the convert procedure. Now that the items will remain charged to the DISCARD users until we remove them, we will be changing these reports to count, or list, the items that were checked out to the DISCARD users in the previous month. We will change the reports in early September. The report you receive on September 1 will include the items checked out August 5 through August 31.