Mark Records Invisible

There is a way to hide bibliographic records from searches made by regular users BUT visible to librarians.

  • When editing a bibliographic record, you will see an option on the top left called “mark invisible”. If the box next to it is checked off, a regular user cannot see it, BUT, a librarian will be able to see it or find it. NOTE: The OPAC or catalog searches bibliographic records, NOT holding records.

  • When marking a record “invisible", the system adds a 994#a field and a “0” is placed as its value. This is what makes it “invisible”. If you want to mark a group of records “invisible”, you will have to search for them first in the bibliographic table and make a global change to add field 994#a with the value “0” (no quotes).

Ideas to keep track of your invisible records.

  • In "Groups", create an item group (you can call it "mark invisible"), and move the items there. In “members”, the titles are shown in a column and have hyperlinks to open and edit the bibliographic record. At this point, you can place a check on “mark invisible” and save each record.

  • If you need many records to be invisible, we recommend contacting Mandarin technical services to do this for you. We will need either a list of barcodes OR a way to search for them (title, ISBN, etc.). We will perform a "find and replace" procedure under "cataloging tools" to find those titles and globally add field 994#a = 0 to all those titles.

  • If you need to find your "invisible" records, from "find and replace", you can search for them as shown in the image below:

Tech note: In order use this feature, the database has to have the updated bibliographic.reg file