From there, they contact the department and arrange for a tagger to visit the site. Sometimes equipment enters the University through means other than a simple purchase. It may be donated. It may arrive with a new faculty member. Occasionally a piece of equipment that's never been tagged or catalogued simply turns up during a regular departmental inventory.
Some items leave the system through the Surplus Store.
If a piece is simply too outmoded or worn out to be of further use to anybody, it's carted off to the Surplus Store and deleted from the database. Some items may live on in other ways. Even though a piece of scientific equipment may no longer be useful where it is, it might be transferred to another department that can use it. A broken machine often can be cannibalized and its parts used in other machines. When a researcher leaves the University for another job, and there's a piece of equipment they need to continue their research, a transfer may be negotiated with the other institution, allowing the equipment to follow its user.