Preparing for a stocktake II

Guide used: Stocktaking Heritage Helpsheet HM46 + Webinar

 I am so glad I have tested the system twice. Yesterday I thought I would quickly scan books' barcodes into an excel file and upload into Heritage Cirqa. This, I suppose, could work well if your library was in a good state of affairs...

"Messy library shelves" by Nett E is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0. 

This is not the case here as the library was more or less abandonned for years. I recatalogued the whole library, but this was done in haste, and now it shows. 

So the tricky thing with uploading your barcodes into an excel (then converted as .csv file) is that you get data such as: "Error: ID not found in catalogue" This is on me I suppose, difficult to blame others: I have catalogued items but not double-checked that all the copies have their barcodes recognised by the system. Most barcodes are fine, there's just a few. So not great to use excel really as you find yourself doing what? Going back to the shelves to search for barcodes?

So today I tried the Heritage/Cirqa scan accession directly into the system. It's not difficult as I work on a laptop. Much much better! It tells you straight away if there is something wrong with a book, such as ID not found in catalogue, or you scanned the same book twice - happens a lot and will over the summer as I'm sure there will be visitors and extra tasks to do. You can easily pile up your books with issues and then sort them out in the system later.

The missing stock list prints in a good format making it easy to check the shelves. Then, if you find some of the books (hopefully that will happen?) you just scan the accessions numbers again, and rerun the missing stock list.

Now I need to discover more of the process of missing items, a good idea to add this as an event, that's for sure, as there will be many, many missing books and I don't feel comfortable just erasing this data. There is always, anyway, the possibility to not show missing items in the public catalogue.

Time for a clean up

 Time for a clean up of the library, though reshelving should be done not long before the stocktake I suppose as books have a tendency to move. I always insist with the students to leave the books on the tables, that saves a lot of trouble.

I have allocated a hell of a lot of time for this stock-take, from 25 July till 10 August, all this for...1,218 books to process. But if you include reshelving before hand and testing, it is not that long. Also, thinking that I will be doing this myself, I will not spend 8 hours a day on this. I like my wrists as they are and do not wish to injure myself. So that could be about 4 hours a day. Which seems reasonable as there will be students working on their dissertation in the library so I have to be there to... offer database search help, Harvard referencing or kleenex if needed for a cry session.  

One easy think to do right now is to check for weird accession status code, there are some that I normally never use or no longer use such as quarantined item, in circulation or processing. Spent a bit of time yesterday getting lost in Heritage Cirqa (I didn't feel like checking a guide and strongly believe there's a lot to win in getting lost, such as browsing a nicely catalogued catalogue rather than searching etc...) coz I knew I had items with this status but I did not know what items. Found it now. So I will locate the items in question and then probably spend some time understand how to change their status. I'll get there!

This could (almost) be an autoportrait: wise, calm, getting prepared

"Orang-Utan" by Robert Schöller is marked with CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.