Lists of Items and Titles

One of the most useful ways of using reports can be to get lists of items meeting a certain criteria. Here are some examples of these kind of reports:

• Large Print items added last month
• Current AVRC items in collection
• List items marked missing so staff can check shelves for them
• Items that need cataloging work
  • ON-ORDER records (Technote)
  • ONTHEFLY records (Technote)
  • ON-ORDER or ONTHEFLY records
  • Board books missing "[text (board book)]" GMD
  • Large print books missing "[text (large print)]"GMD
  • CD books missing "[sound recording (CD book)]" GMD
  • Items that need pagination information in 300 field
  • Items that might need "pieces" added to indicate they are multi-part
  • Items without prices
  • Baker and Taylor 9xx records added last month-to review for any bad records
  • Baker and Taylor 9xx records that have weird info in Author field ("NA", "ILT", etc.) and will need editing/overlaying
  • Items within a certain call number (900s in Dewey in this case) range that haven't circed in 5 years
    • Note: In our system, you should use "last activity" rather than "last charge" for old items because "last charge" didn't carry over data from GEAC to DRA (which we then migrated to Sirsi from).

Extract Reports:

One way of doing a lot of more sophisticated things with item lists is to use the "Extract" report that is in the Bib Custom folder. It extracts all your data as a "|"-delimited file. You can then import that data into Excel or Access (or other equivalents such as OpenOffice or FileMaker Pro ) and use queries, filters and sorts to get the data you want. This can be the best way to find certain kinds of items. It also can result in a more user-friendly, attractive result, since you can format it any way you want.

Working with Extracts

Other Special Tricks:

If your report requires a "search string" and you don't want to use one, try

#0

You can also use #0 when you want to use purely negative (NOT something) criteria in a search string, for example:

#0 NOT "TEXT (BOARD BOOK)"

You can use Caret Codes as search strings with the List Bibliography Report to do more sophisticated searching with item types and other item-level info. These are based on policy numbers for each value. We call these "caret codes" because all the ones we know begin with the "Caret" (^) symbol.

These codes are useful for complex comparisons, for example finding items owned by one library but not another, items unique to one library, items falling into one of several categories OR another set of categories etc. All searches with Caret codes are for the whole record. Basically, this is as though all the item-level tags (Item Categories, Types, Home Location etc.) were set up as keywords on the record and you can do a free-text search of them. Therefore, you can't really use these to find an item that is Type:BOOK and Location:AV, but you can use it to find catalog records that have items attached to it where there is an item of type BOOK and an item of location AV among them.

• WYLD Caret Codes
• More info:
  • Malaspina University