Creating lists - empty variable fields

[innopac@xxxxxxxxxx (Mieko Yamaguchi)]

Have you tried sorting by the Volume field?  I've just carried out a
little experiment and found that item records with a blank (i.e. space)
Volume field sort before items without a Volume field.  I was expecting
blank volume fields to come after those without volume fields but this
trick may find the records you are looking for.

On Wed, 28 Aug 2002, West, Barbara - HPL wrote:

> I've been reading the suggestions about how to create lists of records with
> blank fixed fields.  At HALAN we have a different problem.
>
> We are doing a massive cleanup of the Volume field to prepare for two of our
> member sites initiating Automated Request Processing (aka Patron-Placed
> Holds.)  Lots of messy data came across when we migrated from our old
> system, so I've been creating multitudes of lists and using MilCat to delete
> invalid volume data.  Any data in the volume field will prompt the patron to
> select a specific item for hold rather than placing a title-level hold,
> which is all that is needed in the majority of cases.
>
> We have recently discovered, however, that even the presence of an -empty-
> volume field will trigger a prompt to select a specific item.  Although the
> final step in my processing is to delete the volume field from records in
> each list, there are an unknown number of empty volume fields remaining in
> the database.  We think they were created because one of our members
> included volume in some of their item templates.
>
> So -- has anyone successfully searched for empty variable fields?  What
> syntax did you use?  Everything I've tried either pulls up records with
> volume fields that aren't really empty, or records with no volume fields at
> all.  There are so many variables involved that looking for records that "do
> not have [value]" is impractical.

Mieko
-----
Mieko Yamaguchi                                m.yamaguchi@xxxxxxxxxx
Technical Services Manager/System Coordinator        +44 (0)1248 382970
Main Library, University of Wales Bangor, UK   +44 (0)1248 382979 (Fax)