2025-10-23 Metadata Management Meeting notes

Lynne: Many legacy items in Special Collections have dates noting when they were given to the institution by a donor or acquired in general. We would like to be able to have the standardized dates available in the Item record for each item, as opposed to a note or multiple notes in the bibliographic record for multiple copies (similar to the Item damaged status with date in Condition accordion). This has been a requested report from our special collections librarians and this field would make sorting by date much easier.

Additional details mentioned in the meeting: Lynne’s institution has only been on FOLIO a couple of years, and they did not migrate over any acquisition’s data. (They stopped entering acquisitions data in their Legacy ILS). Currently, there are only bits of data in the MARC record (599 field). This requires querying a source MARC record and differentiating between copies. In addition, copy numbers were not migrated from Legacy (because they did not enter them), and item records don’t have barcodes.

One potential solution is to add a “date acquired” field to the administrative data accordion. This will allow them to query item data through APIs.

Discussion

Raegan mentioned that this will be useful because not all materials go through acquisitions first.

Sara agreed that the date acquired field will be useful especially if it is a general field that does not refer to acquisitions. However, to make things consistent, Sara suggested that this field be populated with the receipt date automatically when items are acquired through acquisitions. Therefore, this date would be added manually or automatically based on the receipt date.

Felix mentioned custom fields for Inventory is coming in Trillium: https://folio-org.atlassian.net/browse/UXPROD-5370 Custom fields will include a date data type. However, the data will be under its own accordion.

Ryan asked if Lynne would need the ability to batch upload date information. Lynne responded that she has done this for cataloging dates through the Data Import app and MARCedit.

Felix asked if Lynne would like to query this field. Lynne responded that they may want to query this field in the Lists app rather than querying the Inventory app UI.

Sara mentioned the “Item note: Provenance” field as a possibility. However, it is not a date specific field.

The MM SIG agreed that this proposal should move forward because other institutions may have use cases. Options to move this proposal in the FOLIO community include adding to the UXPROD-5370 Jira, creating a user story, or messaging Khalilah in Slack for recommendations.

Autumn: (a) when a final item on a holdings record is deleted, leaving the holdings empty, (b) get an automatic pop-up asking if user would also like to delete the holdings record since it is now empty.

Additional details mentioned during meeting: The request was from a staff member who does a lot of editing, and it saves some clicking.

Discussion

Sara mentioned that it may be helpful to have a warning if the holdings is linked to an order. Also, there is similar functionality in acquisitions. Raegan noted that this should be easy from a development standpoint. For example, currently, when you delete a holdings record, there is a pop-up that warns you that an item is attached. Autumn agreed that this functionality should include a check for dependencies.

There was also discussion regarding limiting this functionality to specific users through permissions.

The MM SIG expressed interest in moving this proposal forward, so Autumn will create a Jira.