Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Right Book On The Right Shelf: Missing And Misshelved Books-- How Barcode Scanning Inventories Can Solve The Patrons' Dilemma, Judith M. Nixon

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

After over thirty years of failing to conduct a comprehensive inventory of the book collection at a large liberal arts library, our patrons complained that they could not find one in five books. Study of the problem indicated that in fact 20% of our books were either missing or miss-shelved. This article discusses the investigation of the problem and the impact after five years of conducting an annual inventory by using hand-held devices to gather barcodes and interface these with our catalog records to find the missing and miss-shelved books. The missing book rate dropped from 5.6% to less than …