weeding old books

[Cathy Nelson]

I am in a new setting this year and have inherited an old collection. After an online analysis, I realized I have an average copyright age of 1988. I set out to weed, beginning in the nonfiction area. I deleted 1165 books at the end of the week. I re-ran that analysis, only to change from 88 to 90, How disappointing. So I set out to begin the fiction section next. I had several helpers, and had sheets with the identified titles to be pulled, and was flabbergasted that many were not found on the shelf. I said to myself they must be lost. I went to the catalog, expecting them to be classified as missing or lost b/c I had been assured an inventory had been done last year. To my dismay, all were supposedly available and on the shelf. I had a nagging suspicion. I am new to using Destiny, but I located a report that would show me the books scanned at inventory (from May 2007) and it would also show me books unaccounted for --that were not scanned during the inventory. This report was well over 100 pages. I found that 50+ pages were for titles unaccounted for. The assistant (who has been there for years) assured me many books were discarded, b/c she had to peel off all identifying labels strike through school names, and box them. We had the sinking realization that none of those books had been deleted from the system. So what to do now? The media coordinator is in talks w/ Destiny's tech support, and it is our hope they can help us do a global delete of those unaccounted for books. But only time will tell. I sure do hate to think I may have to manually one at a time delete those titles. (I'll definitely find me a tech savvy volunteer if that winds up being the case.)

The good news? Maybe the collection is not so bad afterall. The bad news? I am not offering the number of books per student I think I am. The what ifs? What if many of those books show back up? We have alliance plus and another cataloging program at the district level, and I've been assured the titles should I want them back in will be added right away on their end.

Every year no matter where you are it's always something! Anyone else have a back to school story to share?

[abeaman]

I have a ver similar situation here! We weeded extensively last year and discarded over 6000 titles. I did an inventory at the end of the year, finishing on the last day. When the reports were run at the start of this school year to do the clean-up work, we, too, have over 100 pages of titles that were not scanned. We're a university lab school, and lab school cataloging responsiblities have shifted back and forth between the lab schools & university library over the years. We think these titles have been discarded but were not deleted during one of the periods of flux. I'm waiting for the people at the university library to send me the missing titles in managable lists so my assistant can do some checking. First, we need to verify they aren't on the shelf, but I don't really want my assistant to spend days checking 100 pages worth of titles, so I think we'll do some spot checking. Judging by the size of our collection, we're pretty sure they're gone. Then they'll have to be deleted. Fortunately for me, the university library will take care of that - but it's still a mess to clean up!

[Dana]

Cathy,
Do you have a Dolphin scanner, or can you borrow one? You could quickly (depending on the size of your collection) scan in an "in library use" circulation for all books on the shelf (books checked out would already have a circulation). This is just a matter of having a student or aide walk the shelf scanning each barcode and then downloading the data into the circulation system. Run a report for books with no circulations since ---whatever date is effective for you. You then have a list of all missing books which presumably would be the ones you should list as lost. Maybe you would not want to delete them yet.... whatever. Just a thought.
Dana

[Brenda Thompson]

I am planning on having a similar situation occur at the end of the 07-08 school year. This is my first year at this school. The K-8 collection I am working with has never been inventoried. Also when I started the circulation system being used was dos based - I about had a heart attack. What I am encountering are numerous books not in the new web based circulation system. Over the past 4 years the university library has been switching this collection from Winnebago to Voyager by using shelflist cards and during the switch over there are numerous books that did not get entered into the new system. So needless to say the collection information online is not accurate. Before school started we weeded 13 of the big recycle bins of dated materials. Many of those have been withdrawn from the database, but I suspect I wil encounter the same problem you have - multiple records online for books that are no longer in the collection and also multiple books on the shelves that have not been entered. My long term for the collection includes several years of year end inventories and then maybe the database will reflect the current collection.