Currently items can be marked as Missing (if not found in the Library), or Lost (if long overdue on user's account). Missing books are regularly checked on, but some of them cannot be tracked within a reasonable time for users, and the search becomes more of an in-house task than fulfilment of an immediate customer need.
However, it is not possible to distinguish between items marked missing relatively recently and still actively searched for (e.g. because we could not find them immediately when requested by users), and those which were not found after several checks, for a long time, even if we think they should be in the library and we do not want to delete their record.
For that reason the missing books' list is ever growing, and working with it is frustrating because more often than not colleagues are checking for hundreds of items which are not urgent to find (e.g. users do not need them any more), and which are maybe not important to check on regularly as we could mark them available again as and when they re-surface.
I would like to see a separate item status for these books to make our work easier, to eliminate the need to put these items in some sort of Work Order as a workaround because those WOs expire and have their own sets of problems, and to improve our customer service by being able to focus on the missing books currently required by our users.
The new item status could mean an automatic supress from Discovery, would allow us to list these items if we have the need for that, but most importantly, would allow us to treat currently missing (and actively/urgently searched for) items separate from those long-term missing ones