Good to hear about a successfully out-sourced project undertaken here in the UK.
At Edinburgh University, we are currently scoping an 80K volume reclass project as an out-sourced exercise. The UEA approach as described by Julie is very much along the lines of our potential approach. We have worked with Backstage in the past on retrocon projects, and are also aware of Marcive's range of reclassification services. However, I'd be interested to know if anyone has identified any other reclass service suppliers - especially any in the UK.
More generally, our reclassification history here at Edinburgh includes a number of major reclass projects undertaken in-house in recent years. The major one was reclass of over 180,000 volumes in our Older Lending Collection from an in-house "interpretation" of Dewey to LC. More info on this at an archived project page here:
http://www.lib.ed.ac.uk/projects/reclassification.html
We recruited staff at a grade lower than our usual cataloguers. They were tasked with identifying, verifying and applying LC numbers already present in our existing bibs, or to select relevant LC numbers from the LC database. They were given guidelines about obsolete number ranges, and any volumes which potentially fell into this category, or had no 050 or LC database match, were passed to higher-graded cataloguing staff to classify "from scratch").
The priority was on circulating Dewey stock, with Helpdesk and Collections Management staff sending us daily deliveries of returned loans for reclass. Collections Management staff also re-shelved the reclassed material.
The cataloguers all had a small Zebra printer, and printed out/applied new spine labels as part of the process. This was felt to be quicker/more effeicient than sending volumes on to our book processing team, who were largely focusing on purchased acquisitions.
Given the scale of the collection, our one major issue was when we reached the tipping point for capacity in our LC sequence (which had been introduced in 1999). This required major stock moves carried out by external removal contractors - an expensive business. Therefore I would say that building in a realistic estimate for churn/swing space for reclass projects is very important.
Elize
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Elize Rowan
Acquisitions & Metadata Services Manager
Edinburgh University Library
George Square
Edinburgh EH8 9LJ
Tel: +44 (0)131 650 3390 (Tue-Thu)
Tel: +44 (0)131 651 1829 (Mon & Fri)
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-----Original Message-----
From: CIG E-Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Eastoe Julie Mrs (LIB)
Sent: 26 September 2011 11:18
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [CIG-E-FORUM] Reclass projects
At UEA, we outsourced re-classification - reclassifying the majority of our stock from modified LC to pure LC to enable us to purchase items shelf-ready. Our bibliographic records (ca. 700,000 records) were sent to Backstage Library Works and were put through automated and manual matching processes. We spent a lot of time - prior to the data being loaded into our system - spot checking to ensure that the records that were being supplied were good matches. Post-data load, we had two members of staff working full time for a year reviewing reports arising from the process and checking the accuracy of data. We also outsourced the relabelling process; the labels were supplied by Backstage, and a company called Harrow Green provided a Project Manager and a team of staff who applied the new spine labels, and scanned barcodes. The barcode data was loaded at regular intervals throughout the day to update the class mark on the Items records by means of a special program that had been written.
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Julie Eastoe
Collections Support Team Leader
The Library
University of East Anglia
Norwich Research Park
Norwich
NR4 7TJ
Email [log in to unmask]
Information Services
Telephone (01603)592413
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