Stock take - The aftermath

I blogged before Christmas that I had done my first ever library stock take. Well for most of January I have been working through the data produced from this and trying to tidy-up our records so that our catalogue actually reflects our stock.

Thie first stage of this was to locate books that came up as "no accession" these are books that I scanned during the stock take (and are therefore on the shelves) but have no catalogue record. Secondly I had to check/ change the status and location of many of the books. I managed to work my way through this list of books quite quickly.

My current on-going task is to process our 'missing items' this is a rather large list of items that are currently listed as available at Hinckley but were not scaned during the stock take. Part A of this was to establish that none of the books had appeared back on the shelves, Luckily for me quite a few had been retruned at some point. Part B is to work down the list and either withdraw (for items that are over 10 years old/ haven't been borrowed recently) or change their status to missing.

If only it was this simple - I am also making a record of books that have been borrowed in the last couple of years as we need to establish how these have gone missing, it may have been during the move to the new site or they may have been transferred to another site.

At the moment this seems like an arduous and never ending task, I know that when I complete it I will feel a great sense of satisfaction and it will make my job so much easier as we won't be trying to locate books that aren't on the shelves or have students/ staff complaining as they can't find the book they want. It has made me realise that catalogue or systems management is probably not an area of Librarianship I would particularly enjoy as I find it doesn't hold my interest and I get bored easily. I am much happier being at front of house, interatcing with the students and helping them find resources or solve problems.