Invisible Records

Most of the records that are in a library OPAC are there so that people can find them. There are some cases, however, where a library might want a record to be in their catalog but be invisible to patrons searching the OPAC. Koha lets libraries do this by allowing them to suppress individual records.

There are a few system-wide things that need to be in place for this to work:

1. The OPACSupression global setting has to be set to "hide" (nhaisLOCAL has this set)
2. There must be a record in the system that is set to be supressed (the Lilac Public library has a record set this way in the nhaisLOCAL system) 
3. You must have the supress index set up in Zebra (we do -- ByWater took care of this as part of our setup)

Once everything is configured an individual record can be hidden from the OPAC by putting 1 (the number one) into the 942 tag, subfield n of the bibliographic record. It takes a few minutes after you save the record for the OPAC indexing to catch up with your edit, but after that the record will be not be found in OPAC searches. This suppression flag has no impact on the ability of the staff interface to find and display the record. If  the 942n is blank the record will display (assuming nothing else prevents it from doing so) in the OPAC.