Question

Occasionally I see "Ghost Records" in my Primo VE brief results, what are they?

Answer

When you perform a search in Primo VE, your search is performed against the Discovery Index.
The Discovery Index contains a pointer to the Database location for the full record metadata.
When records are found in the Discovery Index, Primo VE then gathers metadata from the Database for each record it displays in the Primo UI.

Primo VE and Alma are designed so that the Discovery Index and records in the database are in always in sync, but occasionally a record is deleted from the database, but not removed from the Discovery Index.

When this occurs, Primo VE finds the record in the Discovery Index during a search, but cannot find the related record in the Database, so it displays a placeholder called "Ghost Record". Primo VE then triggers an internal process to remove those displayed Ghost Records from the Discovery Index.

To the Primo VE search engine, a ghost record looks exactly like a good record, so this is why we cannot just search for all Ghost Records and remove them in a large batch. Primo VE can only identify a ghost record when it tries to gather the metadata needed to display it.