On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 10:59 AM, Cindy Harper <charper_at_colgate.edu> wrote:
> Colgate University built an on-site ASRS in 2005 as part of renovating our
> entire main library. During the 2 years of construction on the building,
> our services were dispersed among several buildings on campus and the
> high-use portion of the collection that remained available to our students
> during that time was entirely housed in the ASRS, requested through our
> online catalog, and delivered to our circulation point in utility vehicle
> loads. Of course, we also made major use of the ConnectNY user-initiated
> resource sharing and traditional ILL. There was user dissatisfaction at
> first, but one thing we learned is that patrons were greatly pleased when we
> made a public awareness campaign to show them how to virtually browse the
> stacks in call-number order using the OPAC. The other thing we heard when
> we moved back into our renovated building was that students were
> disappointed that they had to go to the stacks and find the books
> themselves! And faculty were disappointed when we stopped delivering
> directly to their offices, of course - but we want them to come to the
> library :) . When we opened the new building, we brought up the Encore
> discovery system, and blended it into the classic OPAC site as our keyword
> search (classic indexes are still available in other tabs). Encore doesn't
> have a virtual call number browse feature, but we have asked for this as an
> enhancement - either a linear browse of the shelves, or a hierarchical call
> number facet drill-down.
>
> Cindy Harper, Systems Librarian
> Colgate University Libraries
> charper_at_colgate.edu
> 315-228-7363
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 10:01 AM, Emily Lynema <emily_lynema_at_ncsu.edu>wrote:
>
>> 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 - 11:00:58 EDT