On Fri, Oct 1, 2010 at 7:29 AM, Kyle Banerjee <banerjek_at_uoregon.edu> wrote:
>>
>> "We're going to move out the books that are never checked out, the ones
>> that are never used anymore,"
>>
>
> I hope they're not relying exclusively on circ transaction data to discover
> what is "never used." I realize this may sound insane, but a lot of
> materials are actually used *in the library* without being checked out. The
> nature of the resource and the people who have a lot to do with this.
>
> Years ago, we did a major weeding and storage project at a place I worked at
> did something similar. Just to be safe, we had the shelvers look at our
> proposed list which contained 10's of thousands of items to see if any of
> them jumped out as things they recognized as materials that were used. While
> most were not, there were certainly a number that were.
That's not at all insane. In fact, we use our next-generation ILS
(Evergreen - did y'all catch that valiant attempt to link this thread
to the supposed topic of the mailing list?) to record in-house uses,
and when we did our own PR-free move of items from the stuffed
circulation stacks into storage this summer, we used a combination of
lack of circulation since 1985 and lack of recorded in-house uses
since 2003 to determine likely suspects for movement into storage.
Of course, some patrons disobey the signs posted all around the
library asking them not to reshelve the books and slip books back onto
the shelves by themselves, evading an in-house-use statistic, but at
some point you just have to accept that there is a possibility that
one of those books will show up in your next generation catalogue with
"Storage" in the copy location information and they'll have to ask
someone to retrieve it for them. It seemed like a worthwhile risk for
us to take, in return for breathing room on our stacks.
--
Dan Scott
Laurentian University
Received on Fri Oct 01 2010 - 13:46:52 EDT