Good morning --

Recently, we have received many requests regarding discarded items that are not being purged from the database after the 6-week delay. Generally this is caused by one of two issues that prevent the deletion of item records:

1) The bibliographic record has holds. (Discarded items will be purged when all holds are fulfilled.)
2) The bibliographic record has open orders attached. (Discarded items will be purged when the orders are resolved.)

Keeping up with the number of requests to delete individual items with holds or resolve open orders has become difficult, so in order to provide the best service we can, we ask that member libraries hold off on requests to finish the discard process for individual items.

To help resolve this issue on a larger scale, SWAN will be undertaking a two-phase project to clean up holds and orders so the discard process can run more smoothly:

1) Holds -- We plan to set up a system to identify and cancel holds for which there are no longer eligible items in circulation to fulfill. This will assist with discarding items where your library has the last copy.
2) Orders -- We will be running a report of unfulfilled orders of a certain age (to be determined) in order to coordinate a cleanup project with individual libraries to either cancel orders that will never arrive or resolve orderlines that were not properly closed when the item arrived.

To assuage another concern that has been raised, discarded items that are not purged will not be used in any official SWAN counts for library holdings.

We appreciate your patience with this issue, and we hope that shifting our attention to resolving the root cause rather than individual cases will have a more lasting impact on the integrity of our database. Please let us know if you have any questions.