Difference between retiring and deleting a record

[a.ex...@uea.ac.uk]

Does anyone have any advice about the difference between deleting and retiring a record, whether one is better or either of them has any pitfalls?

Reason for asking. Recently, we have not done much removing of records; we have used Deleting once or twice with theses, for a ‘takedown’, but opinion has also been expressed that retiring items is preferable because it can be ‘undone’, though one member of staff has noted that he would deal with such cases by edits (amend restriction terms metadata, or delete and replace files within the item) rather than retires or deletes. We are looking to establish a proper policy for the first time, and don't feel we know enough about the options. Any thoughts?

Best wishes, Alan

[John Salter]

Hi Alan,
I’ll let others comment on their policies, but from a technical aspect, it is worth considering the OAI-PMH interface, and how it represents records.

 

NB in OAI-PMH terms, ‘deleted’ means ‘not currently available via the OAI-PMH interface’ rather than ‘does not exist at all in the repository’.

 

By default EPrints supports the ‘persistent’ handling of deleted items – see https://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html#DeletedRecords

If a record is retired, the OAI-PMH interface can represent it to harvesters as ‘deleted’ (in OAI-PMH terms).

If a record is deleted/removed/destroyed then it cannot be represented in the OAI-PMH interface, meaning any system that has harvested your records may end up with ‘zombie’ records for these items.

 

Depending on which version of EPrints you are using, the above behaviour may be enforced – any record that has been live cannot easily be deleted.

The above change also means that any record that has been moved from the live archive back to the review area or user work area is represented as ‘deleted’ in the OAI-PMH interface.

 

If you’re minting DOIs for records, these obviously need to have some permanence – although the DataCiteDOI plugin handles this with a ‘tombstone’ page.

 

Cheers,

John

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