End of the Year Inventory

Library Elves by Nessa Dee

Inventory. Some librarians think of it as a curse. Other libraries have done away with it altogether. But for some twisted reason, I love inventory time in the library. Maybe it's because for a brief moment in time, the library shelves are in perfect order and all is right with the world. I imagine only a librarian would understand that logic.

But it's more than just putting books in order and attempting to account for every item in the library. Wrongs get righted. The lost is found. Mistakes are corrected. And when a parent tells me that Junior told her that he returned that book, I can confidently say that the book is not on the shelves in the library. Before I send out those invoices for lost books, I know for a fact those books aren't on the shelves because I was the one that put them in order and afterwards, I checked the shelves for those missing books-- usually multiple times. I don't let student aides or inexperienced volunteers do it because I don't want to invoice a book that may be shelved in the wrong place.

Every library is different, but this is basically what I did for inventory towards the end of the school year:

1. Decide when the library will be closed for inventory. Our school district had seven campus libraries and because we were on our own (no aides), we needed a minimum of two weeks before school ended to do inventory. 
2. Several weeks before the library closes, advertise the rounding up of library books (posters, intercom announcements, Web site, parent notes, written notices to students) as well as the date all books are due. I allowed teachers to continue to check out materials up until the last few days of school if they needed them, but not every librarian chooses to do that.
3. On the library windows the day after the library closes, I post the names of students who still have books out. It's okay to post names, but not the book titles with the names. In our school, students could not attend the end of the year field day or a field trip if their library record was not cleared, so most get serious about finding and returning those books.  Good luck if there is no leverage to get those books back. 
4. Print out a list of overdue books to keep at the desk to refer to; mark off students' names when they've cleared their records on the list and on the window list. Make notes if you need to - for example, if a teacher returns a lost book found on campus, etc.
5. Put all the library books in order. This usually takes me two days. 
6. Using your overdue list, check the shelves to make sure the books aren't there. Sometimes returned books miss getting scanned and are sitting on the shelves, but are still on someone's library record. Check the book in and take their name off the sign and list.
7. Call or send (mail or email) invoices to parents for lost books. I prefer sending a written, documentable record. Steps 1-7 take up most of the first week.
8. We used Follett's Destiny program, which made the actual inventory very easy to do. Once you start the inventory in Destiny, it sorts the collection into two categories: accounted for (the books checked out and on patrons' records), and unaccounted for (everything else). You can use a hand-held device to scan the bar codes of all the items in the library, and then download the records every so often into your circ desk computer, or what I prefer is to put a laptop on a rolling cart, log in to your administration account, and use the circ desk scanner to scan the items directly into Destiny's inventory program. Once an item is scanned, it is moved to the 'accounted for' category. 
9. How long it takes to scan depends on the number of items in your collection and the number of times you are interrupted. It usually took around three days to scan everything in the library. Students and volunteers can help with the scanning, which frees you to do other tasks. You can print out a list afterwards of the unaccounted books, which include the books that were missed during the scanning process, which you can correct, as well as actual lost books. After you've scanned everything, what is remaining in the 'unaccounted for' side are the lost items.
10. If your principal requires a report at the end of the year, you can include the results of the inventory.
11. Some librarians go ahead and remove the lost books' records from the catalog at this point, but I usually waited until the fall because books were often returned to the school over the summer or at the beginning of the school year, and that saved me from having to create new records for them. 
12. Our libraries also helped with equipment inventory, so we helped the tech staff check in all of the teachers' equipment, too.

Inventory is a great time to take a quick look at the collection, too. I sometimes found discrepancies when it came to the call numbers on the book spine and what was in the catalog record. If I couldn't take care of that immediately, I made a note so I could get back to it. And with all of the books in, plus the new ones ordered during the school year, you may find that you are out of room in some areas of the shelves and need to do some shifting and re-arranging. 

I never had enough time at the end of the year to do everything I wanted and needed to do in the library. I used to work until I thought I finished everything, but there was always more to do when it came to library work. I finally learned that it's like housework-- it's never ending and will be there in the morning. But unlike housework, I enjoyed library work. : )