Cleaning item history and populating process status date

Tags: aleph, basic, items
Last Updated: Jul 16, 2010 14:25

• Description

  A service for Aleph version 20 onwards. It calculates the new z30-process-status-date field for all items and deletes uninteresting item history records which have been created as a result of the book circulating. Very useful if you have been using the ALL-FIELDS option in tab_item_history.eng and are switching to ALL-NON-CIRC. Using this service reduced our item history from about 7,000,000 rows to 2,000,000.

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• Author: Matthew Phillips
• Additional author(s):
• Institution: University of Dundee
• Year: 2010

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• License: GNU Public General Licence

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• Skill required for using this code:
  basic

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Detailed description

This service cleans up Z30H item history to remove "uninteresting" item history records. If you have had the ALL-FIELDS event active in tab_item_history.eng then an item history record will have been created every time the item is returned, as the loan count and last return date on the item records are updated.

Aleph now has an option for ALL-NON-CIRC which can be used instead of ALL-FIELDS to catch item changes which are not circulation-related. We are now using this. This script allows us to delete the item history records which we are not interested in which would not have been created in the first place had ALL-NON-CIRC always been available and active.

In addition, Aleph version 20 introduces a new field, Z30_PROCESS_STATUS_DATE, which records the date that the item process status
was last changed. This makes it much easier to run reports which list all items set to a particular process status in the last month, say. This field is only populated for newly created item history records and newly edited items. The script works out what the process status date should be for all history records and for the current item records, and updates the records
accordingly.

State

Stable.

Programming language

Perl.

Software requirements

None.

Download

Please download the tar.gz archive for unpacking on your server.

Installation instructions

Transfer the .tgz file to your Unix server and place it in a new temporary directory. Then issue the following commands (assuming that the file is called "file.tgz"):

gunzip file.tgz
tar -xvf file.tar

The contents of the file will be unpacked. A ReadMe file is included which summarises the rest of the installation procedure.

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