Planning Inventory

You may want to create a plan before you take inventory. This plan can help you to inventory your collections completely and efficiently.

You may want to follow these suggestions to develop an effective inventory plan:

Create a schedule showing the order in which you will inventory your collection. Remember to include your smaller collections, special collections, and non circulating items.
While planning your schedule, you may want to see how long you took for a previous inventory on the same collection.
Decide which types of items will be listed as exceptions and how you will resolve those exceptions. (For example, some items your library might want to track as exception items would be misshelved items, items found but not cataloged, duplicate items, items marked for interlibrary loan that should have been shipped, and so forth.)
Divide your large collections into manageable groups up to about 10,000 items. That way, you can resolve each group’s exception items immediately, instead of waiting until the entire collection has been inventoried.

Note: To divide your larger collections into smaller groups, you might want to inventory items on a certain number of shelves or a certain range of call numbers, or use any other type of range that fits the way you do inventory in your library.

Choose a method for collecting barcodes. You can use workstations, hand-held computers, or a combination of these.
Leave enough time after entering each group of barcodes to print the Inventory Exceptions report and resolve any problems you find. The sooner you resolve the problems, the more likely that the items will still be on the shelves. You should resolve all the problems for one collection before starting inventory for another collection.
Because inventory involves many people, you might want to develop a method to monitor your inventory progress. (For example, you can create a chart that shows a group of call numbers and what has been completed for each section, such as the reports that have already been run.)

 


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