Rather belatedly replying to Esther about a PL experience (having just realised that I had not unsuspended my jiscmail account after a day off!)

A few years ago we decided to categorise some of our adult non-fiction - an initiative encouraged by senior management. We were not dispensing with Dewey but adding a category which became the shelfmark and thus needed to be on the spine of the books.
Changing the cataloge was laborious but we had a part-time cataloguer who spent most of his time on it (and retired soon afterwards which may or may not have been connected.)
Tellnig the 90 odd branches was relatively easy as we could export information from our then LMS to an Access database and then produce a list for each branch of what they had and what to respine it to, together with the new spine labels produced in WORD on (small) address type labels. Because there was support at a  high level and we gave branches the labels and the details of the titles they had it went relatively smoothly.
If we tried something like that now we would be in more difficulty because the pressure on field staff is much greater. Also getting the data out of our current LMS would probably be more complex and the County Council does not support Access any more - so we would have to find some other way of doing that part - though Excel might work. We don't have plans for DDC23 for instance.

it's also worth saying that we don't have any significant reserve stacks and are much more aggressive than we used to be about getting rid of stock which does not issue and replacing the grubby stock (grubby in a literal sense but often traced by the fact that it has issue more than x number of times.) This could mean that when the change of class no is not major we might simply use DDC23 for new titles and leave others to wither on the vine.

Andrew Coburn

Acquisitions & Cataloguing Manager
Libraries (Resources)

Essex County Council
Telephone: 01245 244957 (or 01245 284981 ext 255)

Email: [log in to unmask] | www.essex.gov.uk 
 
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