Bug 27360 added a "Public" flag to the branches table. It would be great to leverage this flag to not display branches in the masthead search branch dropdown and the advanced search branch dropdown. Over the past few years, we've had libraries temporarily or permanently close down, and while we want to keep those libraries in the staff interface, we don't want public users to be able to easily see them.
There are other use cases too. Sometimes there are non-public branches in general, data cleanup to be done for a branch, etc. You can use OpacHiddenItems to hide all the items for a branch, but you can't currently hide the branch.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 12242 ***