[Sca-librarians] shelfreading

[Judith A Kirk]

I'm at a big academic library and we're recently undergone a major weeding/deselection project in conjunction with a number of other Michigan libraries. Some of us are keeping certain holdings, while others are discarding their duplicates of our holdings. (WHY did the library community choose "Deselection" over "Weeding"; does it sound sexier?)

This is enabling a number of Michigan academic libraries to clear material off their shelves where duplicate or better coverage is located at other sister institutions. This has been going on for almost two years and we're about done with it.

We have a Stacks staff supervisor and a number of student assistants who regularly shelf-read. The student training for shelf-reading and re-shelving is pretty thorough.

We find that books end up in locked faculty study carrels without being actually charged out to them, and that makes for a real inconvenience. We can't remove the books from the carrel, and sometimes we end up ordering an additional copy of something that went 'missing' into some faculty's study room. I find that more of an ongoing annoyance than mis-shelved items.

We are also taking on a massive project we hadn't planned on: as a side effect of having to move thousands of old bound serials from Storage in a building scheduled for demolition in two months, we are finding we need to weed out old bound serials where we have permanent electronic coverage. That's a major project in and of itself, coming on top of having about 100K bound serials moving from east to west campus for processing, packing, and moving to a new storage facility.

And we're looking for a new ILS.

Goat Rodeo in Kalamazoo Michigan! Glad I'm only working two full weeks in July, I'm missing some of the pandemonium :-)

Siobhan