The Right Book on the Right Shelf: Missing and Misshelved Books—How Bar Code Scanning Inventories Can Solve the Patrons’ Dilemma

Abstract

After more than 30 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. A study of the problem indicated that in fact 20% of our books were either missing or misshelved. This article discusses the investigation of the problem and the impact after five years of conducting an annual inventory by using handheld devices to gather bar codes and interface these with our catalog records to find the missing and misshelved books. The missing book rate dropped from 5.6% to less than one half percent. The misshelved book rate dropped steadily every year from 11.6% to 3.1%. The number of books reported as missing by our patrons dropped 90%.

KEYWORDS:

• misshelved books
• inventory
• missing books
• handheld devices
• bar coding

Notes

∗The book collection is approximately 500,000 volumes. The number of scanned bar codes is always lower because of the number of books in circulation.