It’s the most wonderful time of the year… not.  Well, there is a certain satisfaction is completing inventory.  But inventory at three schools annually wears me out.  I’m very thankful for library automation and a remote scanner (Dolphin) when inventory rolls around each May.  For those of you youngsters, the old way of doing inventory was to take the shelf list – one drawer at a time – and check it against the books on the shelves.  A shelf list, in case you don’t know, was a special card catalog with one card for each book in the library, filed in shelf order.  It always took two people to work on inventory, one to read the titles and one to check the shelves.  It was almost impossible to do alone.  Missing books were marked with a paperclip on the shelf list card.  A second paperclip meant missing two years in a row.  We pulled the cards the third year, including all cards in the card catalog.  Primitive, but effective.  I’m not sure everyone used the paperclip method, but that is what I was taught during my student teaching at Homewood Flossmoor High School in spring of 1981. 

Today, even with automation, we prefer two people working the shelves.  One person scanning and one person moving the books so they can be easily scanned.  Our barcodes are on the back of the covers in the upper right corner so they are easy to scan during inventory.

I only have experience with Follett Catalog Plus, so I’m not sure how universal this is, but we run the exception report after each download.  It checks the shelf order, and although we have already shelf-read the books it catches our mistakes.  And it also catches books that were shelved but still checked out to an individual.  This, too, requires two people.  I generally interpret the exception report, calling out possible corrections and my aide checks the shelf.  Sometimes we just scanned them out of order.  Little books hide and you get messed up!  And sometimes the report is just wrong especially if you do not have consistent authority records…as we don’t.  If an author is listed with the date and without, for example, the computer thinks it is two different authors and reacts.  So once again, the human brain is superior to the machine!  But boy, do we appreciate the machine during “that inventory time of year”.