Sue McMillan wrote:

Hi Anne, I don't believe there is a bulk biblio delete built into Koha. It certainly would be a good development though.

Perhaps she's on one of the PTFS/Liblime versions of their Koha-based ILS? At least one of the Liblime sporks has a batch item deletion and editing tool. I have not found it to be very useful and instead do all the batch record editing with MarcEdit (free, though not open-source). When there are a large number of deletions, I use Undo Import if at all possible. I have wondered why the process of deleting records is so tedious in Koha generally. You cannot delete the biblio without first deleting the items attached, and that adds quite a few steps to the process. It's a lot of clicks and it's a slow process. One of our ebook vendors deleted a few thousand books last year from our subscription. The amount of staff time needed to go through all the steps of deleting those records was unreasonable, so we just suppressed the records in the OPAC. We would have preferred to delete the records entirely. In some library systems, they have a batch deletion method that allows you to delete records by batch uploading the MARC records with a "deletion flag" in one of the fields. Since our major ebook subscription vendor does provide MARC records when they delete books, it would be simple to change one field to have a deletion flag with MarcEdit and then upload those. It would certainly be quicker than thousands of iterations of the rather tedious individual delete item/delete biblio procedure. I'm just mentioning it here because you might want to consider incorporating something like that into Koha. There is no quick and easy delete method other than undo-ing entire batches in any version of Koha, as far as I know. If you are working on a tool that allows the deletion based on biblionumber or biblioitemnumber, consider including an interface that allows users to enter a range of continuous numbers, so you could specify deletion of record 132000-132600 or whatever, rather having to list each number individually. Having an input box that allowed thta kind of range of records would have made the Liblime tool much more useful, and would have provided an viable alternative to the batch undo method, which doesn't always work perfectly. As with the bulk edit/delet tool, there have been other features added to the proprietary Liblime version of Koha that sounded useful when planned, but turned out to either not have the functionality expected or else broke some other important feature when activated. For example, there is a "simple search" feature which was highly anticipated because it was supposed to offer a more user-friendly search syntax. The feature exists, but if you turn it on, Advanced Search no longer works properly. As a consequence, I don't think many libraries are using that feature. I've sometimes wondered whether the people active in software new feature development process need to explicitly include the phrase "should not interfere with any existing functionality" when they're writing specifications. It's kind of like the medical principle of "First, do no harm". I think end-users assume this is implicit in their proposals but designers sometimes fail to preserve the full functionality of the program in the design process. . -- Stacy Pober Information Alchemist Riverdale, NY 10471 stacy.pober@manhattan.edu

From: Sue McMillan <sue.mcmillan@STDC.govt.nz> Hi Anne, I don't believe there is a bulk biblio delete built into Koha.  It certainly would be a good development though.

Regards

Susan McMillan Cataloguing and Systems Librarian| South Taranaki District Council 105-111 Albion St, Private Bag 902, Hawera 4610, NZ Phone: +64 6 278 0555 | www.southtaranaki.com ?

-----Original Message----- From: koha-bounces@lists.katipo.co.nz [mailto:koha-bounces@lists.katipo.co.nz] On Behalf Of library Sent: Friday, 27 January 2012 12:52 p.m. To: koha@lists.katipo.co.nz Subject: Re: [Koha] Biblio deletion

When I try to import the file into the Batch Item Delete tool I get the following message. I'm not sure I have understood the function of the tool as it seems to be asking for a barcode not the biblio numbers that I am trying to load. Software error:

Can't call method "as_usmarc" on an undefined value at /koha/lib/C4/Items.pm line 589.

Regards Ann Murphy