Earlier in the year, I put a request out on the list asking if anybody had
procedures in place to calculate a KPI for the ordering, cataloguing and
processing of new material.

The libraries which responded all use some form of tracking slip to record
relevant dates (some record each stage e.g. date the item is recommended,
date ordered, date received, date catalogued, date processed, etc.  while
others simply record date received and date sent to shelving).  Most operate
some form of sampling (e.g. "irregular", "600 per month") though one library
records the data for all books received.  Most use Excel for analysis.  My
thanks to those of you who replied.

I also asked a couple of non-Innopac libraries.  One reported that its
system had limitations rather similar to those in Innopac and only records
the time elapsed between receipt and cataloguing.  The other (interestingly
with the same system!) had tweaked theirs and enter the date an item is
recommended in an empty field in the order record. Date order is sent and
date received are both recorded by the system.  In order to capture the date
that the book is completely processed and sent for shelving, a special
status field is set when the item is received and this status is cleared by
wanding barcodes through a "global update" process just before the item is
sent for shelving.  The Library system produces weekly reports detailing how
many weeks all items in cataloguing/processing have been waiting since
receipt.  I give this in considerable detail as the Innopac status field
could be used in a similar way if anybody was interested.

From all these responses, it was clear that my ambition of measuring time
elapsed from placing order to shelf-ready without using additional staff
time would be very difficult.  In the end, I implemented a system based on a
sample of one day each month.  On that day, we set up a PC in rapid update
to change icode1 in the item record to a specific value (we don't use icode1
very much at all, so the field was available, but one of the internal use
counts would also have served the purpose).  Each book barcode is wanded,
setting the icode1 value.  The next day a review file is generated and (with
a bit of fiddling) the ODATE field in the attached order record emailed out
and copied into Excel.  The date ordered is subtracted from the sample date
and we are able to calculate how many items meet our target of 75% of all
books passing through the entire system in less than 55 working days.  We
also have a KPI of 75% of our short loan books passing through in less than
35 working days, calculated on the relevant subset of this sample.  We've
run it now for 5 months - not only is the system practicable, but we have
also substantially exceeded these targets in the majority of cases.

One last comment.  Many colleagues were unhappy about including the
turnaround on orders within the KPI since this is outside the Library's
control.  However experience so far suggests that this isn't a great problem
as the odd problem in supply won't impinge on the figures provided you
express the KPI in this form and don't calculate an average length of time.
We do also exclude non-Roman script items from the KPI as a matter of
policy!!

I hope I haven't bored you all with this very long email!

Michael


********************************************
Michael Emly
Collection Management Services Team Leader
tel. +44 (0)113 343 6444
email: [log in to unmask]
Postal address:
Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT