IA Frozen Items Discussion

Background

During the course of administering Gemini issues, it came to staff's attention that scanned items had been "frozen" in IA without the knowledge of the scanning institutions. IA has a metadata field called the "Curate" field, which can either be set to "Approved" or "Frozen." Items with a curate field of "Frozen" are automatically ignored by the BHL ingest process. This means that these items never get ingested into the BHL collection. As staff were not aware that these items had been "frozen," no efforts were made to correct the problems and see that the items were "approved" and ingested into BHL. Staff downloaded a list of all Biodiversity items marked as "frozen" and alerted the affected institutions with the specifics of the problematic items. As of March, 2011, all affected institutions had sent back, or were in the process of sending back, all "frozen" items for rescanning. Several of these institutions also discussed the problem with their scanning centers, developing a workflow to ensure that no additional items were "frozen" without BHL staff knowledge. It is highly recommended that any new BHL partners negotiate similiar arrangements with their scanning centers.

List of BHL Frozen Items

Biodiversity Books Frozen in IA.xlsx