Good Morning,
Don't most of us keep adding more physical items to the collections faster than we can add shelf space on campus? In Florida the state university libraries fortunately have a shared storage facility scheduled to be built next year and open in 2012. This will allow us to keep many less frequently used items available for those scholarly needs we don't have the clairvoyance to predict without having to house all of them on campus.
So far selecting the items to be kept on campus where they can be browsed on the shelf by users rather than in an existing smaller storage facility from which items must be retrieved on request has been based on a combination of age, collection manager judgment and number of times the item has circulated. Decisions are not final, so items that are requested may be transferred back to a campus location. A major renovation of the main library a few years ago forced us to develop temporary offsite storage options and educated us regarding its challenges. Yes, students complained loudly.
I wanted to mention that in our Marston Science Library studies have been done using the ILS to record usage of items that had to be re-shelved but were not checked out.
I also wanted to highlight the importance of fully cataloging storage collections. It has sadly been common for older federal documents to be managed using the Monthly Catalog and remain unknown to users of the library catalog. Our pre-1976 documents are now the target of a major cataloging project to remedy this situation. Most of these are now in temporary storage and will be moved into the shared storage facility when it is built. A key requirement for items to go into that facility is that they be cataloged.
Shouldn't each library be as unique as the population it serves? The community of libraries is deserving of high praise for the effectiveness of its collaboration towards meeting user needs.
Hooray for us all and Happy Friday,
Jimmie
Jimmie Lundgren
Associate Chair & Contributed Cataloging Unit Head
Cataloging & Metadata Dept.
Smathers Library
PO Box 117004
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL 32611-7004
352-273-2725
352-392-7365 (fax)
jimlund_at_ufl.edu
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of B.G. Sloan
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2010 6:50 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: [NGC4LIB] CSU library finds 40% of collection hasn't circulated
Kind of interesting...Colorado State University analyzed its circulation records and found that "some 40 percent of the library's 2.5 million volume collection hasn't been checked out since librarians moved to an electronic tracking system 20 years ago."
Here's an article about it: http://bit.ly/aUVY6i
Must have some implications for planning for future libraries/catalogs.
Bernie Sloan
Received on Fri Oct 01 2010 - 08:27:58 EDT