Evegreen should be able to un-merge records

[Beth Willis]

In the case where bib records are merged incorrectly, it may be desirable to undelete the subordinate record rather than reimporting it.  When the subordinate record is undeleted, the merge history is still highlighted at the top of the record (please see attached screenshot).   While this situation is likely to occur infrequently,  this display can be confusing to staff.   It would be preferable to suppress the merge history display on undeleted bib records.

Note: another option would be to update the merged_to field in biblio.record_entry during the undelete process.  However, discussion on the original wishlist bug (https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/1744996) did not support this option.

EG 3.5.1

[Rogan Hamby (rogan-hamby)]

Since Evergreen doesn't have a native undelete concept this will be awkward. We could add a trigger that triggers off an undelete but it won't have any idea if the undelete is because of a merger reversal or not. Note that if we add something like a utility function to unmerge record merges that bundles undeleting a record and unsettling the merge to I think we should take that as an opportunity to add some merge tracking, specifically tracking volumes moved and title level holds and move those back as appropriate.

[Elaine Hardy (ehardy)]

Ideally, I would like to be able to have easy access to logs for all actions to a bib record from that record -- when it was imported/created, when it was edited, deleted, merged, unmerged, undeleted, etc and to the creator, editor, etc. Perhaps a link for Record actions?

An unmerge function would be marvelous!

For this specific request, my preference would be to add information for the undeletion, if possible, rather than removing the merge notice. If not possible to add an undeleted note, then removing the merged note would be helpful.

[Rogan Hamby (rogan-hamby)]

Quick note just for info dump purposes that in addition to tracking volumes and bibs that in the case of call number collisions where copies are moved they will need to be tracked as well. Also, holds, bib, volume and copy where moved and unmerge should move the holds back if they are not captured/fulfilled.

[Elizabeth Davis (elidavis)]

We would also like to be able to identify which holds were placed on which merged records. This would help when large print and regular print record are incorrectly merged, and we need to break them apart again.