Library IT have just begun tracking when an item is transferred to Storage, and how often it is used once it has moved there. This is in response to a need to be able to produce more detailed reports for staff when they are weeding from Storage. Hopefully we should get some helpful indications of usage even a couple of years down the track.
If you’re interested in the technical details of what we’re doing, please read on…
We have created a new field in the item record which is called the storage date. Obviously we don’t know when the items that are already in the Warehouse were transferred there, so they have been given a dummy storage date of 1/1/2009. The exception to this is for items that have been transferred to Crown – these have a storage date of 16/11/2009.
From now on, whenever an item is transferred to Storage, an automatic process adds that date to the storage date field. We are also tracking item usage both before and after the item is transferred to Storage by using the “no. of ckos” and “saved no. of ckos” fields. As mentioned above, all the processes that update this data are automatic so staff workflows will not be affected.
Alison
This is superb as it will give a lot of useful information just at a time we are also getting relevancy ranking on Summon which may change to some extent what items people want.
I would hope, however, it does notgive too much emphasis to usage as a criteria for consideration for deselection ("weeding" is such a pejorative term). I would assume we only have about 10 years of usage stats which is a very short time in the lifetime of a library that is more than 100 years old. As Robin Stevens used to say we need to think about what is going to be of the most use in 50-100 years! This is perhaps a major distinction between an academic library and a public library?
With the instant everything expectations people have today I also find some people at the desk are turned off from using items that are in storage simply because there is a delay in getting hold of them which of course does not necessarily mean that it is not the most suitable item.
All that rant out of the way now can someone tell me is there somewhere on Camelot where it indicates how to transfer items to and from storage to and from the regular on the shelf collections?