I agree with Dan that it is a bit of a moot point to argue about the benefits of moving materials to off-site storage. It is absolutely going to happen. But here's the thing....it's been happening for years as we buy more and more e-books and digital collections. If the argument is that users need to be able to 'browse' the physical stacks, they've already been unable to discover digital materials in this way for some time now.
But here's where I think this topic does tie in with NGC4LIB. The question we should be asking ourselves is "What are our patrons losing when we move our physical print materials off-site? Are there tools we can build to help them recover that usefulness in new ways?"
It's for that exact reason that we are continuing to explore different, enriched ways to browse the collection virtually at NCSU, in addition to thinking about what enhanced delivery services we can offer to our patrons to make it easier and more reliable to get a book out of an automated retrieval system than it was to go find it in the stacks.
I bet there are a lot of cool new discovery tools we could think about that way make both digital collections AND materials stored off-site accessible to our patrons.
As for the use case that Tim pointed out, it seems like those materials should have been part of a reference collection of some sort. It goes without saying that as libraries contemplate major changes like these, our job is to be listening to our patrons so that we can learn what mistakes we might have made and remedy them. An interesting idea that has been tossed around here is to retain on open browsing shelves the materials most recently pulled from the ARS. Perhaps that would need to include materials most frequently pulled from the ARS, too.
-emily
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 1 Oct 2010 13:46:24 -0400
From: Dan Scott <dan_at_COFFEECODE.NET>
Subject: Re: CSU library finds 40% of collection hasn't circulated
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
--
Emily Lynema
Associate Department Head
Information Technology, NCSU Libraries
919-513-8031
emily_lynema_at_ncsu.edu
Received on Tue Oct 05 2010 - 10:01:50 EDT