All Things Inventory

You may have noticed that we were closed Wednesdays in August for inventory. So, why did we need to be closed for that and why did we need to do an inventory?

CAMALS, our library system that links Carroll and Madison County, is doing a system-wide inventory this year. So, this spring, our sister libraries in St. Paul and Kingston did their inventories, this summer we did ours while Green Forest conducted theirs, and Eureka Springs and Huntsville are up next.

I’ve worked at the library here in Berryville on and off for 15 years, and in that time, we’ve never done an inventory that I was aware of, so it’s definitely an overdue task.

For our inventory process, it mainly consists of scanning, lots of scanning! When you start the inventory, everything in the library is unseen, but once you scan each individual item, be it a book or DVD or audiobook or telescope, it becomes seen. Everything that remains unseen at the end is declared lost. It gives us a more accurate idea of what is actually on our shelves since it requires us to physically pick up each item.

This is a good thing! It can be tricky logistically, though, when you have 40,000+ items to scan, which is the case for our library. Our smaller libraries are able to close for a day and scan everything, but there’s no possible way to scan 40,000 items in a day. So, that’s why we closed for 5 days in August.

Before then, throughout May, June, and July, one coworker and I did individually scan smaller sections of the library, like biography, YA nonfiction, music, science fiction, etc. Those parts of the library are all tucked away and small enough that we could do that with minimal disruption, especially during our busy summer programming. All told, about 2,000 items were “seen” this way. But it would be impossible to do the scanning or even the legwork to hunt down unseen items in busier sections of the library.

Though our inventory had been ongoing since May, 1-2 people working on inventory once a week for an hour or two is a very different situation than 5-7 people working on it all day once a week, so we had a bit of a learning curve.

On our first full day of inventory (August 2), I conducted an inventory training and then we scanned all of YA and audiobooks, as well as a lot of Espanol. We scanned about 3,000 items that day.

The next day of inventory (August 9) was easily the most challenging. This was the day we tackled most of the children’s section. There are lots of individual report classes (categories we divided the inventory into) in this section, and the books are very tiny. So, a shelf full of children’s easy books is going to take far longer to scan than the same shelf full of YA or adult books. We scanned around 6,000 items on this day, including serials/magazines, but were still left with all of children’s nonfiction for the next week. That’s another 2,000 items to scan.

By the 3rd week (August 16), though, we’d hit our stride. We scanned approximately the same amount of books as we did before, but in doing so, we worked our way through all of children’s nonfiction plus all of adult nonfiction and Westerns. We’d thought it would be an accomplishment to just wrap up all of nonfiction, so we were very excited.

However, I personally consider August 23 our crowning achievement of inventory. We’d allocated the entire day for fiction and were concerned about whether or not we’d be able to scan all of it in one day because our fiction section consists of nearly 8,000 items, well over what we’d scanned on any previous day. That being said, we not only finished all of fiction but also all of mystery, for a grand total of 10,000 items scanned in a day.

I wasn’t present for our final day of inventory (August 30), but by then, our only remaining section to scan was DVDs, and my coworkers scanned over 5,000 of them that day.

So, are we done with inventory? Well, not quite, but nothing that remains is something we have to close the library to do. The scanning of course is the big focus of discussing inventory and planning it, but there’s a fair amount of other things that have to be done before the inventory can be finalized, especially when you’re working by report class.

When you finalize an inventory, everything outstanding is declared lost. But you don’t really want to take this step unless you’re pretty sure it is actually lost, so we would try to track down unseen items to ensure they weren’t mis-shelved. Other items were on hold or in transit to or from one of our other sister libraries. For those, we have to keep track of them. Once they arrive back home to us or get checked out, they are seen and accounted for. But until then, they’re unseen.

During the course of inventory, we learned more about our ILS system Atriuum, which we switched to in December 2020, and we also found some long-lost items in strange places. (My personal favorite being the random audiobooks that were discovered crammed into a magazine rack after we’d declared the audiobooks lost. There is no telling how long they’d been there.) We also found a few books from our other libraries on our shelves and learned that some of our items were also accidentally misfiled at other branches. We also discovered some books that had been removed from the system still on the shelves.

Thank you so much to Julie, Mary-Esther, Jen, Kelli, Briana, and Anna for all their hard work on the inventory and to April for patiently answering all our inventory questions!

If you have any further questions about inventory, please feel free to ask them in the comments!