Cori Wilhelm: All right. Hi, everyone.
Cori Wilhelm: Thanks for joining us today for the next spotlight on Sunny Library Series today, we're going to be talking about collection inventory.
Cori Wilhelm: and our presenters are David Schuster, the senior director for library technology and digital strategies. I think that's right. At Theington University libraries and Jeff Goldstein, the access services, technology and Operations coordinator at university, at the Albany libraries. we are recording this session, and we'll post the recording and
Cori Wilhelm: transcript afterward and send it out to folks, and I'll say, if you have a question during the presentation, you can throw it in the chat or raise your hand. I won't interrupt as we're flowing, but if there's time, you know, we'll call in folks and interject from the chat, and we do hope to have plenty of time at the end
Cori Wilhelm: for some open discussion and questions. so I will turn it over now to David and Jeff.
David Schuster: There we go. I have to get myself unmuted.
David Schuster: can you all see the
David Schuster: the slide show with Binghamton? And why we're doing this? Okay, good. So Jeff and I talked a little bit about our process. So I'm gonna start out with a little bit about what Binghamton's doing, and then I'm gonna hand it off to Jeff, but you are welcome to ask questions, and I hope Cory will help me track if hands go up or chat stuff. So here we go.
David Schuster: Bingington, why are we doing this? we've never done an inventory at Binghamton, and they've been automated for over 30 years on 4 different systems, maybe 3.
David Schuster: I did a sampling of different collections, and I discovered some very discrepant information on what was on the shelf and what wasn't on the shelf, and I wrote a little report about that, and that is cited at the end of my presentation. it's published in the Charleston.
David Schuster: I can't remember the name of their little publication, but the citation is there with the link. There were a lot of items when we moved things to our annex when it opened over 12 years ago that never went through tech services. And so they did. A bunch of batch changes, and those barcodes may or may not have been the ones that went out to the Annex. And so we're finding a lot of things that are on the shelf that say that they were at the Annexe.
David Schuster: and we're also finding a lot of things at the Annex that are supposed to be here at Bartle. So we're doing kind of a real big clean up in in that process.
David Schuster: we also in the preparation for our third floor move as we're being renovated. I was over the tech services at that period of time, and we tried to. We made a strong effort to inventory the 450,000 items that were on those shelves
David Schuster: to get a better count as to what we were going to be moving off of the third floor and have a better idea of where it was, and those items were moved off of the third floor into another location during the construction.
David Schuster: And so we inventory about 340,000 326,000 items off of that third floor. And here are some of the information that we found, you know we had 10,685 that we ended up putting into missing. Many of them have been found in the meantime, but it was a you know. They're not on the shelf where they're supposed to be.
David Schuster: we
David Schuster: There were 223 items that were marked as being on the shelf, or that were marked as missing. But they were actually on the shelf. So as we went through this process, we were able to verify that they were on the shelf and check them back in which either took them off of patron records or cleared outstanding problems
David Schuster: we had the way we do our inventory. We do sections at a time rather than any type of validation. And so
David Schuster: what we look at is one range or 3 ranges at a time, depending on how much we scan.
David Schuster: and then we load that into Alma, and we run some processes on it, and it tells us that it within those sections of shelves. If things don't fall within that call number range.
David Schuster: So I'm not so concerned because this is our first inventory about. Is our things an exact order I'm just more concerned of? Is it on the shelf, or is it not on the shelf
David Schuster: and within that range, or does it fit within that range? And so we found a lot of things that you know, 7,000 items that were out of range
David Schuster: or
David Schuster: part of that is, they may have the wrong call number on the spine label, then what matches in Alma, and so, therefore they fall out of a range. And so we've been cleaning those types of things up as we go.
David Schuster: During that period of time we have found 750 items that didn't have bar codes
David Schuster: and a lot of that. What we discovered is they have those little cards that you see up there in the right hand corner. We had a Punch card system during the Ibm heyday, where they had use that as a part of a circulation system.
David Schuster: and so generally when we find these cards, that means that they never got barcoded in that process. So that's always when you open up the book to scan the barcode we're like, oh, this is gonna probably be a problem.
David Schuster: in some collections. Just needed a lot of shelf reading before we started.
David Schuster: they were noticing that even within the range things were way out of water. And so we've worked with the reader services or the access services group to do some shelf reading prior to scanning and certain collections just because, the collection where it was located didn't have a lot of attention put to it. And so that's a collaboration. And in saying that we do, all of our processing is actually handled by the Technical services group.
David Schuster: mainly because they're the ones who are gonna have to make the changes anyway. And what we ended up doing is we hired 3 or 4 work study students the tech services. People work 8 to 5. Usually. So the work study students can come and go during the day as they need to.
David Schuster: we have chromebooks with wireless barcode scanners attached to them. the wireless scanners are like 30 bucks, and the chromebooks are, you know, 200 to $300. I've also done this with ipads, which are a lot cheaper. you just have to have some way. It has to be a Bluetooth scanner. If you're gonna use that so that it can connect to the ipad.
David Schuster: they use Google sheets to keep track of what students are scanning, what ranges, so that we know exactly what is getting scanned and how far along we are. The students then notify the staff when there is a set of bar codes ready to be processed.
David Schuster: and then this the staff actually run the reports that are necessary to identify the missing or lost items. I have some documentation that I've linked further below that we can that I'll share out as part of this presentation that you'll be able to access.
David Schuster: The staff runs the reports. Usually they will do the clean up. They might mark up a sheet to have the students go check the machine, the the shelves. they did
David Schuster: last semester. We're really lucky to have one student who really understood the process well, and so they were able to actually get the reports and then do the clean up themselves, so that the staff didn't actually have to do some of the the actual physical work.
David Schuster: The problems become very tricky. And I think, Jeff is gonna talk a little bit more about that later. But you know, within that range is there a barcode that doesn't fit bad call numbers. They don't match the spine.
David Schuster: They're in the wrong collection. Those are usually pretty easy. they might have the wrong status you know, it's still in transit from some place, and so it think it's on the shelf. But it's it's on the shelf, but it shouldn't be. And so those are just little things that you have to dig into almost a little bit.
David Schuster: things with wrong call number types. These are a little challenging, because it looks like they're in the right collection.
David Schuster: But
David Schuster: if it's not coded right in the holdings when we migrated, then the item the call number type doesn't match. And so what happens there is when you do a call number browse, then oftentimes that won't show up right on a report, or even in analytics, they won't show up in in the right
David Schuster: place because you've got the wrong call number normalization string that they're using. So this is helping us to clean up some of those pieces as well.
David Schuster: this is just an example of a inventory tracking. we're doing this primarily to
David Schuster: show return on the investment. You know. Why are we doing this? This is how I get my numbers things are out of order. Things are missing. We're also having the students, you know. If there's they open up a book and it starts to fall apart. Then they take that back to the tech services, and they'll send those up to the preservation department to have them fixed or they'll actually talk it over with the bibliographer to to determine if they want a replacement copy, or if that item should be weeded.
David Schuster: So there's some, not a lot of that kind of work going on. But there is some, you know, interaction with other departments depending on the
David Schuster: the status of that particular book.
Cori Wilhelm: we do have one question, David. I don't know if I should interrupt. Sorry! Jill's asking, how did you handle duplicate bar codes?
David Schuster: So we have not run into any duplicate bar coats.
David Schuster: The only time that I have come across duplicate bar codes. We've we've had multiple books with this, with multiple bar codes, you know, one book with. There's they put a barcode on the back and a book barcode in the front, and so that'll usually show up like on a missing list. But I haven't encountered any duplicate bar codes per se And usually I could, you know, because we're doing the scanning in multiple locations.
David Schuster: we could potentially double check the shelves to see that. if the bar code was at another location. But generally we haven't had that problem in in what we found. So
David Schuster: I don't know.
David Schuster: Yeah, we can. We can come back to that, maybe at the end and and open it up to the whole group side. Interrupt, continue good. and so these all link out to documentation that I put together. this was mainly like for the students. I can you still see this, how to scan.
David Schuster: So you know this is what I consider a ladder. this is a
David Schuster: come on. The images are pulling up right away through this, but it gives images, so that the students kind of have a like an idea of what the process looks like and how we want them to scan the materials, you know. Take the books off the shelf, put them this way on the cart, open it up, scan it this way, and then put them back on the shelf so that they stay in order.
David Schuster: There it comes.
David Schuster: So But those are. I'll share this presentation, so you'll have access to those documents. and then we run a job in Omaha that sets the inventory dates. So we know how many items we're scanned. And when they were scanned that also helps us somewhat. You know, if we run across something that has a duplicate bar code that might also be something that we can look at to see if it was scanned at another time.
David Schuster: And then we run a job that sits those items that we're not scanned, and Alma doesn't know where they are that we can set them to missing.
David Schuster: And then this is the article from Let's get technical about My sampling project that we did that led us to go into inventory.
David Schuster: and at that I will turn it over to Jeff. I will stop sharing.
Cori Wilhelm: and we can see that now, Jeff. That looks good.
Jeff Goldstein: Sorry I had to find the the unmute button once the controls moved around.
Jeff Goldstein: so Hi, everyone I'm Jeff Goldstein, and I'm at you, Albany. And so David has worked previously in tech services or works closer with tech services. I'm on the access services side of things and
Jeff Goldstein: our staffing is a little bit different, too. We have some around a dozen staff within access services.
Jeff Goldstein: and our tech services staff has been pretty decimated over the last few years.
Jeff Goldstein: so most of this processing and everything is run through access services side of things. And then when we have materials to fix and things like that, you know. We'll we'll work with tech services that so
Jeff Goldstein: just to briefly, go through our process. So
Jeff Goldstein: you know. First we define the scanning areas, then we'll actually go and scan. We'll run the reports. We'll pull and fix the errors, and then we'll search for a that's for you know, our, our basic process. so
Jeff Goldstein: you know, defining the scanning areas? I don't know if you could see here. But basically, it's, you know, we have a lot of hands in this process.
Jeff Goldstein: I don't want to be both the bottleneck as well as the person going through and actually running all the reports and having to keep, you know, hand in every single piece that's going on. So we keep one Master Spreadsheet going on, of what are all the things in the process? So we might have about 5 or 6 sections being scanned at once, and we might also have finished a bunch of sections. So we're currently fixing those areas which works for us because the students when they come in.
Jeff Goldstein: Okay, what do you want to do today? Well, I'll do some inventory standing, and then I'll do some inventory fixing. So, even though they're both inventory, it's very different work, and it gives them variety to do and we need both sides of those done. But so you know, David mentioned some of the errors and the the that
Jeff Goldstein: we're doing the inventory, and what we're trying to catch. So those are on the screen here. But, You know as we go through.
Jeff Goldstein: You know the we make sure that the students understand why they're doing it.
Jeff Goldstein: And also we make sure that they understand
Jeff Goldstein: that we run these reports, and we are concerned about the shelf order. So if they scan the books out of order, the report's gonna say books are out of order, so that we found we had to track down. Okay, which exact student is scanning the books right to left it to the left, to right, because all the books are actually in order. So it's little things like that. But you know, then we have to go back and figure out what it was
Jeff Goldstein: But yeah. So someone went upstairs, and you know. So again, we chose which sections to start with.
Jeff Goldstein: you know, and they just grab the call number from the beginning and end. So it's all in one place, and then when we go to the run of the reports, it's all there to copy and paste. So Here's just an example. of the sheets that are out on our clipboards.
Jeff Goldstein: and we use a standalone barcode scanner. I mean it. It has a mode where you could hook it up to a device, but it's about 75 bucks for the the sturdy one that can be dropped a lot, because well.
Jeff Goldstein: we do drop them a lot, and it they it'll it'll store tens of thousands of bar codes. But we don't.
Jeff Goldstein: Can you leave that only in one shot?
Jeff Goldstein: But so we'll go up with those. So we don't need to worry about the computers or anything. We had started off with that. But People kept closing out, or the Wi-fi kept kicking people out and stuff like that. So we went this room instead.
Jeff Goldstein: hey? So we'll download the files off the bar code, reader will upload them into Alma to do into the shelf report.
Jeff Goldstein: And unfortunately, with I tech being down? I'd show you the other system. But
Jeff Goldstein: I think Tim coordinated with somebody over at itch
Jeff Goldstein: One of the another school had written this Api that basically you upload the bar codes to it. It'll tell you these are the things that are out of order, and these are not in the system. These have other things going on with them
Jeff Goldstein: which the the shelf report will tell you some of that.
Jeff Goldstein: but not all of it, and not in a neat
Jeff Goldstein: or usable way.
Jeff Goldstein: So what we do is we'll pull the report that we get from that other system.
Jeff Goldstein: We'll do a whole bunch of changes to it in excel. And we'll have a list like this that we can give to the students
Jeff Goldstein: to go upstairs, and if it's highlighted in yellow, that'll be something that they need to pull, and if it is not yellow, then it's just something that is out of order. And
Jeff Goldstein: the this will actually tell you. Oh, it's between this call number and this phone number when it was scanned in originally. it will also say, move it X number of spaces, but we tell them to ignore it.
Jeff Goldstein: because again, I don't want them counting out when a book is 5,000 books off from where it's supposed to be. I don't want them counting out the number of books so as long as they can find the book and put it where it goes. That's you know what we care about.
Jeff Goldstein: so far in terms of that.
Jeff Goldstein: Just want to show you so
Jeff Goldstein: again, like I said. So we've got our inventory master file.
Jeff Goldstein: A bunch of people, different people will log in. We keep track of what's currently being scan. What's finished scanning what's been printed out. What has it? What's been run through the different systems?
Jeff Goldstein: because again, it's there's a lot of moving pieces to this. And if we can't communicate or keep track of things, forget it. We'll just end up on doing our own work. But
Jeff Goldstein: so and here's an example of the the output file. Like I said, we have to do a little bit of manipulating of this.
Jeff Goldstein: and I have a a mini template that's marked as read. Only so people can just paste into it
Jeff Goldstein: each time. But
Jeff Goldstein: basically in the problem column, it'll tell you what's wrong with it. So these first books on here are not in our system. So
Jeff Goldstein: you know, obviously, those need to get pulled. And unfortunately it says exactly where they were scanned. Then. for this particular book over here.
Jeff Goldstein: because it's in the temporary location. Il, so it's possible. There was just a few day delay between when we scanned it, and when we were in the report, and in that time the book might have gone out on il or resource sharing. So it's in a just a different temporary location.
Jeff Goldstein: these 2 are in a work order department. So it's entirely possible that maybe when the student was scanning it the Bar code fell off. So we scanned the Bar code to send it down to
Jeff Goldstein: our technical services staff to fix.
Jeff Goldstein: those are temporary locations.
Jeff Goldstein: and you know, different things like that. And, like David mentioned, you know, wrong call number type. We'll see in there. And basically it has anything that's a star star.
Jeff Goldstein: anything other than out of order. Star, star.
Jeff Goldstein: It will automatically highlight it yellow, and tell the students to to to pull it
Jeff Goldstein: And
Jeff Goldstein: and thought this was accessible to the public. It's not so. I'll make sure that I get this
Jeff Goldstein: shared on a base camp later on. But basically I have it broken broken down, click by click. What people need to do when processing the different reports, and how to format them
Jeff Goldstein: and print them off in excel and it also has some explanations with what to do with the polls. So you know again, most of these issues with the polls will get sent to tech services. But you know again, it's the bar code, or I have not found
Jeff Goldstein: Sometimes we'll see the little suppressed I in the record, and we just send those downstairs. Sometimes we'll have a different loan status lost or missing technical migration transit.
Jeff Goldstein: etc. wrong location. But David said, with their storage facility. We find that quite a bit across our libraries, where something was supposed to go to storage, and somehow ended up back on the shelves.
Jeff Goldstein: like, item, type, wrong item, type, things like that.
Jeff Goldstein: we've got in there. And one other thing I wanted to point out.
Jeff Goldstein: So we actually start. Excuse me.
Jeff Goldstein: One of the
Jeff Goldstein: you know the main focuses of inventory for us is we want to make sure that our catalog reflects reality.
Jeff Goldstein: you know the whole point of this is to fix that. So
Jeff Goldstein: if a book is on the shelves.
Jeff Goldstein: but it doesn't say in the catalogue, well, that's something that nobody is going to stumble upon. So we want to make sure that that again the catalogue reflects the reality of it.
Jeff Goldstein: And on the flip side, if it's something that's not really on the cell. We want to make sure the catalog says so more often than not a lot of these things come up when we're trying to do false either for
Jeff Goldstein: resource, sharing il or whatever it is. So
Jeff Goldstein: you know we'll go upstairs, you know. We'll search the trial if we can't find it.
Jeff Goldstein: rather than spending a lot of time stouring the shelves right away.
Jeff Goldstein: we'll actually search our folder where we keep all of these barcode files
Jeff Goldstein: for our inventory. And you know, we could just type like.
Jeff Goldstein: you know, content equals. And then, put the bar code in there. and it'll show. Oh, look! It was in these files, so maybe we haven't had a chance to fix that particular file yet, but
Jeff Goldstein: I have a list of those bar codes so I can just pull it out. Do a search for the bar code.
Jeff Goldstein: copy the bar code before it get the call number for that, the one after it that'll help us to track it down relatively quickly.
Jeff Goldstein: and also in that folder we keep track of every single truck that item on every single truck that we shelves. We started doing this originally because, when we were training new students
Jeff Goldstein: one of the staff members was having the students go up and hand right
Jeff Goldstein: every single call member down on the piece of paper. So we take the student about 45 min to write down the phone numbers of all the books on the pro.
Jeff Goldstein: So I had worked with you many, many years ago. where we started skating those into not that.
Jeff Goldstein: and then uploading them into Olive, and then it would get give us a report. And one of the other things that we noticed on there was
Jeff Goldstein: on that report. It would also tell us, oh, by the way, this part of another collection it's checked out and things like that. And
Jeff Goldstein: as part of our quality control process, we started running these proc audits on every single truck so that we could catch the problems before we sent the books up to the stacks with problems.
Jeff Goldstein: So we've been doing that ever since, and have thousands and probably millions of our codes at this point that we capture. So again, the the inventory files are in the same folder
Jeff Goldstein: as our truck audits. So this way, when we do search for a bar code, we're searching everything, everything, and that a lot of times will
Jeff Goldstein: make our work a lot easier, and we'll waste less time on searching
Jeff Goldstein: for the things when we need them, so that we can be proactive about it. So
Jeff Goldstein: that is what I've got. So anyone have any questions for Dave or I know we've bothered a lot.
Cori Wilhelm: Okay, folks, a moment. But I think we can come back to Jill's question about
Cori Wilhelm: duplicate bar codes.
Cori Wilhelm: So David did have a thought that he shared in the chat. But I'm just wondering if the larger group
Cori Wilhelm: you know, we have a lot of folks on here who are involved in systems and inventory
Cori Wilhelm: and we have a lot of sls staff on the call. So if anyone can give any insight about duplicate bar. Because, Jill, are these
Cori Wilhelm: duplicate bar codes like
Cori Wilhelm: 2 books, same bar code, or one book, 2 barcode
Jill Kehoe: who books? Same barcode.
Cori Wilhelm: Okay? And is that just from having different systems. You know the books were cataloged at different times in in history. Maybe the Barc has got repeated, or is it a glitch in the system, do you think?
Jill Kehoe: Well, what happened was? We imported all of our records from our ships library, which is on open. Biblio.
Jill Kehoe: and Alma didn't
Jill Kehoe: alert us to the fact that there were duplicate bar codes until we did the inventory and
Jill Kehoe: is the inventory went crazy because it was like, well, this book is supposed to be in circulating, and then I went to circulating, and I was like, Well, wait a second.
Jill Kehoe: And there was at least 2,000 books that had this issue.
Jill Kehoe: our solution was to just re-barcode them. which was probably not efficient. But if you are bar coding like a new acquisition, and you go to duplicate a barcode. Alma does yell at you and does not let you do that.
Cori Wilhelm: but it didn't catch it on the import on the back and forth
Cori Wilhelm: as the name Alice encountered this, or how have any solutions they can maybe offer?
Jeff Goldstein: I would say, for us if we're running the the shelf reading report to
Jeff Goldstein: that. There's a good chance that the items with the same bar code are not physically one right next to the other. So you're probably going to be told in that report that the item is either out of range or out of order. You're probably going to be pulling it that way.
Jeff Goldstein: And then when you go to scan the item in hopefully it will.
Jeff Goldstein: So a mismatch in the record.
Jeff Goldstein: Sorry. No, that doesn't totally count.
Cori Wilhelm: And I see Steve asked about call numbers. If there's spacing or inconsistencies and both of you
Cori Wilhelm: that there isn't a problem with that the system can clean it up in a way that you can keep going.
Cori Wilhelm: I had a question, David, when I saw your punch cards. Does that mean that the books haven't circulated
Cori Wilhelm: like I'm assuming you don't have a Punch current circulation system. So if the book has never been bar coded
David Schuster: correct, so they didn't have a bar code. But oftentimes the bib record was in Ola, or all of but that also means it has not circulated since we migrated and potentially even longer?
Cori Wilhelm: so did you use inventory as an opportunity for any meeting? Or are they 2 separate processes. So you didn't want to.
David Schuster: It's 2 separate processes, because if we involve the bibliographers in all of these books that we found on the shelf that weren't bar coded.
Cori Wilhelm: we never get anywhere.
David Schuster: So we just we just barcode them and put them back on the shelf.
Cori Wilhelm: And sometimes, if there's a duplicate, then they might have a conversation with the bibliographers about, you know, do you want to keep this or should we get rid of it
Cori Wilhelm: and the students that you use I assume these are
Cori Wilhelm: trained and trusted students.
Cori Wilhelm: in in my previous campus using students for inventory was always, if you because, like, Jeff said, maybe they scanned in the wrong direction. Maybe they missed books, or you know.
Cori Wilhelm: they need to really be the
Cori Wilhelm: the best of the best student workers. Right?
David Schuster: We usually do some pretty good training with them, and because we're not necessarily watching call number order, you know, right to left isn't quite as critical. but they do, you know.
David Schuster: Hang out with them for a couple of days, as they're doing the inventory demand their questions or problems. But then, you know, they come and go as they need to, and if they run an inventory report, oftentimes, if they're doing something incorrect that'll show up on the report as they're running those reports, and they can flag that and potentially do some remedial training with the students if they need it. but it it's it's
David Schuster: not rocket science. And so it's really pretty simple. you. Just here's your shelf, you know. Here's your range. Scan the bar codes into not pad, and
David Schuster: you're good to go
Jeff Goldstein: would say that for our
Jeff Goldstein: our inventory scanning. So our student supervisors will grab those clipboards, and they'll kind of spot that. You know. How much did the students scan in this amount of time?
Jeff Goldstein: And that'll more draw red flags. For who are the problem? Quick ones? And you know it's it's really just looking at the quantity scandal. We'll bring that out. until that they, until they show that they are called fishing and call members. We do not have them get anywhere near trying to fix try to fix the bad call numbers, or once they're out of order.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah, that's understandable.
Cori Wilhelm: any questions from the group, or questions for each other from the group?
Cori Wilhelm: Are most of the folks on the call working in
Cori Wilhelm: in projects like this inventory and meeting and cataloging.
Cori Wilhelm: All right.
Cori Wilhelm: Emily says Ed, on deck is going to do inventory this summer. I it does seem like a I said, like a summer project on a lot of campuses. especially those like at or on deck, that have very small staff.
Cori Wilhelm: you just don't have a chance to do it.
Cori Wilhelm: you know, during during the school year, when the students are here. Monroe is also in return this summer.
Cori Wilhelm: It's the that for your whole staff. Emily.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah.
Cori Wilhelm: all right. Any any other best practices anyone wants to share from the group or tips. Before we let you go.
Cori Wilhelm: we will share out the recording, and we'll share out the resources from our presenters as well.
Cori Wilhelm: and jc, I don't know who this is.
Cori Wilhelm: Jc. Randall.
Cori Wilhelm: didn't inventory this
Cori Wilhelm: all in spring semester. So the kind of a long project.
Cori Wilhelm: all right. Well, we can
Cori Wilhelm: awesome.