Have you exceeded—or are you close to exceeding—your patron and item record limits? Do your reports look cluttered? Is it sometimes hard to find things in your catalog? If so, it's probably time to clean up your data! Doing so will free up space and make your collection easier to manage and search.

Ways to Clean Up Your Data

• Remove lost, discarded, or archived items. Check out the Remove Copies tab of our End of Year Procedures for easy instructions on how to do this. But if you want to save these items, be sure to do an export first!

• Weed out items in your library. See what needs to go by running a Weeding List report. Then you can choose the appropriate utility to get rid of the items you want to remove.

• Weed out your Transferred and Inactive patrons. Run an Inactive Patrons report to make sure you want to remove everyone who shows up on that list. Then you can run the Remove Patrons utility and select for those with the status you wish to remove.

• Clean up your terms and fields using the Authority Control tool. Pay special attention to your Series terms and make sure they are standardized.
  • Set the terms—Autofill and Authority Control
  • Spring Cleaning—Authority Control
  • Cleaning up Your Subject Tags
  • Cataloging Series and Serials (Best Practices and Series tabs)

• Consolidate multiple copies under one title using the Move Copies To This Title function in Items Management.