Wishlist: A setting to remove display of bibs with no items in a non CONS search in the staff catalog

[Mary Llewellyn]

We have our catalogers use CONS as their search library so they can find all records, with and without items, when they need to catalog their own items.

However, the public services staff use their own library as a search library, and that's where we run into staff confusion.

When they run into a bib record with no items, they report that to us as an error.
When they are searching in their own library, they expect to only retrieve records with their items.

Our acq staff members are adding an "on order" copy to the records when they activate their purchase orders, so there's no need for them to place holds on empty bibs. The display of empty bibs in a library-based search instead of CONS serves no useful purpose to us.

I recognize that other Evergreen sites don't see this as a problem, preferring to use color coding to identify empty bibs in searches like this. But we had color coding when we first migrated to Evergreen, and it drew many complaints. We'd rather not go back to that approach.

We'd like to see a library setting that suppresses display of the empty bibs when using an individual library as the search library. We'd still want to see them when using CONS as the search library.

[Tiffany Little (tslittle)]

What about a checkbox in Search Preferences for "Include empty bibs"? Then catalogers could have that checked and everyone else have it unchecked.

[Elaine Hardy (ehardy)]

A check box would be preferable since catalogers would need to be able to find empty records regardless of the scope of the search. Not being able to find those records would have a negative impact on PINES catalogers.

[Mary Llewellyn (mllewell)]

That means having to chase down all my public services librarians and catalogers to get them to set the search preference properly. I'd rather do it from a library setting level so our consortium can set it centrally. Our catalogers are not searching at the library level, so I don't expect them to be negatively impacted.

We'd want it scoped for the library so the empty records still show in a CONS level search. If another Evergreen site doesn't want it, they don't have to use the library setting.

[Terran McCanna (tmccanna)]

If the library setting were only to set a default that would be fine, but it would not be viable for our staff for it to be a hard on/off setting.

[Mary Llewellyn (mllewell)]

We'd want the default to be to only show empty records in the staff catalog when the search library is CONS. There is no reason to see empty bibs at the library level in our system.

[Elaine Hardy (ehardy)]

I think giving staff the power to control how they configure searching would be preferable to controlling it on a library level, just as they can control whether to see e-resources records or set any other filter. If they don't take advantage of it, then that is on them.

[Jennifer Pringle (jpringle-u)]

+1 to the check box in Search Preferences

[Mary Llewellyn (mllewell)]

And in our situation, central control would be preferable.

[Mike Rylander (mrylander)]

There is a branch available for another LP bug (1746800) that adds a search modifier for excluding empty bibs in a staff search, and with a sticky checkbox (perhaps that defaults based on a setting/preference) I think it would do what's needed.

I link it here as a starting point, not a full solution, because it needs the checkbox and whatever is decided for the default behavior recording mechanism.

https://git.evergreen-ils.org/?p=working/Evergreen.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/user/miker/lp-1746800-exclude_empty_bibs_option