 All right. Good morning. Let me get my mouse over here. There we go. Now I'll go back. There we go. Now we're ready. Okay. Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. The show is broadcast live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time, but it is recorded and then posted to our website later for anyone who's unable to join us on Wednesday mornings. And I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can access those archives. Both the live show and the archives are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think that may be interested in any of the topics that we have on the show. We cover a variety of things here on Encompass Live, interviews, book reviews, mini-training sessions, demos of services and products, anything that we think that may be of interest to libraries. And as the Nebraska Library Commission, we're the state agency for all libraries in the state. So we serve all of them. So you will see things for public, academic, colleges and universities, K-12, corrections, museums. We are all across the board here. So if you have anything to do with, that's really our only criteria is library. So if you have anything to do with libraries, you probably will find something that will be useful to you. We do do sessions that are with the Nebraska Library Commission staff, or things that we are specifically offering here focused on us. But we also bring in guest speakers as we have this morning. So with me today is Akeena Walker from, as you can see here, Director of our Akeena Memorial Library in Fremont, Nebraska, just drove down here this morning. What, not even an hour? Not even an hour. Yeah, quickly tripped into Lincoln to talk about, which apparently is, people apparently are very scared of it. Yes. Hopefully by the end of this hour they'll help us out as much. Across our fingers. So I'm going to hand over to you to go ahead and take it away. You can either use the mouse or the keyboard. Either one should work to advance your slides. Well, I did the presentation originally because K-Memorial Library did their first inventory in at least 20 years. I saw that. That's scary, but I bet you it's very common. Yes. Unfortunately. Something happens a lot and our staff were noticing that our failure rate on their library loan was almost 62% because there were thousands, like 50,000 items listed at OCLC that we didn't own anymore. So this is where the idea came from. Staff said we need to do something. I have done an inventory before, but it was at a college library. And so we kept track of everything that we did. We took notes. We compared who thought we did what right wrong, how to fix it. So then we came up with, I came up with this presentation and it's, I think, a little informative. So we'll show you a little bit. My first slide is just kind of who I am. This is me and Baker and Taylor at ALA. Awesome. That was fun. They gave me many ones. And then Carla Haydeen last year at ALA. I love the Google coffee mug. It's my favorite. And then that's my baby Judas. So if you're a member matter, you will if you ever see me. Yes. So we are our mid-sized library. Our collection count right now is 87,000. That's just print. Our door counts about 9,000 a month or 290. That's actually increased this year. We're up to about 308 people a day. We have eight. Yeah, it's going up. Eight people worked Saturday and Sunday to complete the largest parts of our inventory. I did wind up paying overtime. And we had to bring the people in for extra hours. We used mobile search from our iPads and we used laptops for the project. We took turns scanning and the others watched the computer to verify that things were doing what they were supposed to do when we weren't having errors. And we started the inventory on March 11th. We're still cleaning a few things up because we have some very special collections that have not been barcoded and we're still in the process of barcoding those. So we are still working on this. So people ask, why do you need to do an inventory? We absolutely needed an accurate count of our collection, what size and value for insurance purposes, I believe our insurance says we have like 165,000 pieces and that's really wrong. So we, some of our special collections have to be insured on our own. So we provide, right? Yes, you need a, yeah. So we have one collection alone that's 50,000. So we had to redo that, provide accurate collection counts to OCLC. That's huge because if you are not aware, you pay based on your number of records. And I couldn't figure out why our cost was so high after coming from other organizations. And I called mass and they said, well, we have you down as 172,000 of records. And we're like, not even close. So after the inventory, they're going to spend the next year monitoring our usage and our collection count. And then we'll be able to reduce our cost of CLC next year. Making more accurate to what you actually have in the building. We're literally paying for over double what we actually have. And they won't just change it. They have to show a historical decrease. So once they show that, we'll go down to price. We also need to make sure items were checked in. When I first started, the number of patrons coming in because they have returned things and they weren't checked in was really, really bad. So we looked at barcode scanners. We retrained everybody on the processes. And then we started doing shelf reading to try to prevent this. But we needed a starting point that said everything in this building is checked in. So that the inventory helps with that. We also found a lot of lost items, long lost overdues and missing items. We even found probably a couple hundred items that had technically been weeded, but we're still on the shelf. So we're not really sure how, but we were able to find those. And so we did in that they weren't in the catalog or they had been removed from the catalog, discarded. They were on a list that have been having been weeded and left the building, but they were still, they went back to the shelf. So we found out, we think at one point when you put everything on carts and you line the carts up in your work area. If you don't put good signage on those carts, people do the wrong things. So somebody shelled the cart of weeded material. So we're working on our, our signage and making sure if there's stuff on a cart, everybody knows exactly why it's there. Yeah. That's a very difficult thing to work on, but that's part of the inventory process. And we also got to look at every book that's on the shelf. Depending on the size of your collection, if you just walk out there right now and grab the entire section and physically pulled every book and looked at it, you're going to find at least 10 probably that are wet damaged. They stink. There's something wrong with them. So during the inventory process, we looked at every book just to make sure that they're, and we did find a lot of things that were damaged. And that's not a thing that obviously is not a thing then that is part of the check-in process of checking or hadn't been well kept up when books were returned to the library. Yes. Some of those things you'd think that there would be some sort of a when a book is returned, you have to make sure it's okay to go back on the shelf. And we, if that wasn't really a regular. Right. So we re-train the process. We have a lot of new people too, but it was a matter of don't just quickly glance at it, you know, fling through the pages and see if it, you know, just really fast and easy to see. But sometimes we get overwhelmed for a short shift. Yeah. And we'll have people bring in 15, 60 books at a time and set them on our counter. Wow. Yeah. So they get overwhelmed. How many books can you check out at a time? Well, if a family comes in together. Okay. Yeah. All their books and they bring them all together. So we also not only look at the physical book, but we check the labels and the call numbers. So if you don't know, historically, if you go back and look at your library over the last 30 years, every time a new cataloger came in, your catalog can change. Oh, sure. And so it's hard for people to shelf books when the call numbers change and how you put them in the shelf changes. So we flag those to be redone so that we can redo all of our labels to match. It helps patrons find books. It helps our staff to put things where they belong. So, and we cleaned up some that were just ridiculously long. Yeah. Three numbers after the cutter, things of that nature. So these are all reasons we did an inventory. I'm sure there's more. This is what we needed to do. And we met all of these criteria by doing our inventory. So now you said the last time an inventory was done was at least 20 years ago. Was there any record of what was done at that time? Okay. Because I know sometimes some places have done, I've worked at a library when we were, when you're barcoding the books for the first time growing electronics, that that's a time something, because you just have to do, like you said, touch every book at that time. I don't think they actually, they may have done an in-house inventory, but they didn't upload to OCLC. Oh, yeah. So we have no idea. And that was where your huge discrepancy was. Yeah. What they thought you had. So as things are being added, collection, they're just getting added to OCLC. Yes. As you remove them, they're being moved from your local, but nobody was falling up with OCLC side as well. Yes. It was a mess. So we cleaned that, we're cleaning up, I should say. I know, I know. So it doesn't matter where I start. This is extremely important because there were things that we should have done before we started that we didn't. So this is where this list was generated from. So items to do before you start an inventory, shelf read the entire building if you can. That's just a quick swipe with your shelf reading function of your ILS just to make sure that things are checked in and they're in the right collection. It really helps if you just do a very brief shelf reading before you start inventory. Clean up unused collection codes and item status. So we use Cersei Dynex Horizon and we have 183 collection codes because since the day it was created, the codes have never been cleaned up. When you stopped using it, it was just over there and you added the new ones. Yes. When things change. So when you have to go scroll through to find a code to click on, you have to scroll through on it. Huge. Yeah. So clean up your collection codes, clean up your item statuses, get rid of things that you no longer using which are not tied to any records. And then it helps when you have to start doing those drop down menus and selecting things. Clean up your lost item categories. So we had not done that in several years. So our lost item list was over 6000 items. It was ridiculous at one point. We finally just wiped everything out and said if it's still here, we'll add it back later. You'll find it. We're going to go through the entire building. Sure. But otherwise when you get your reports generated out of what's missing, you're going to have 6000 items in pages upon pages. So fix your lost items first. Even if you just delete them and then add them back later when you do the inventory, put display items back in your regular collections that will really mess things up. So if you have, we have like seven or eight different display sections right now, put them all back where they belong. It's easier for everybody's brain to know where the items are supposed to be. Rather than trying to remember, oh, these aren't here because they're over there at the moment. Yeah. And everybody thinks they're going to remember they don't. So just put things where they belong. So then for a certain amount of time, and after you said how long is the process? Yes. There's no book displays. We went three months with no displays. And we even hold the new books and get rid of the new book shelf for a while. So everything was wherever it's supposed to be. And it also helped us judge our need for shelf spacing because we had reached capacity. Oh, yeah. That's a big problem, definitely. So that helped with that also. So did you put something else in those blank spots just so that it looks so... No, we put signage up. Oh, saying we're doing this project? So that's kind of cool. That's what I was wondering too, telling your users, this is what's happening. They didn't like this process. And it's going to be for a few months, but it's going to be better in the end. Yes. That was the hard part was explaining to them the benefit they were going to get from this, because they just wanted their books to have. The best thing too was the benefits there in the first slide were benefits that we see right a library inside. Do you have something about that? What does it do to the patron? No, actually I didn't. Our main thing was patron access because people weren't being allowed to find things. And then they're getting angry at staff because it says it's at 311.52, but I checked the entire row and it's not there. And we find it in the 600s. Well, our inventory was so messed up, we were finding adult fiction and fiction, children's and nonfiction. Oh my gosh. So it was really hard because in staff we looked incompetent because then we couldn't find it. Right. And it frustrates them, the patrons. Yes. They want to walk in that door, walk straight to the catalog, walk to where they're supposed to be, pick them up on the shelf and leave. And that's our job to make sure. That's not supposed to work. Exactly. That's the definition of using a library for the basic services. Yeah. And you know we're all very perfectionists in libraries. And so to me, it was like a slap in the face. It was like you were so incompetent at your job and I'm like, we cannot look like this to the public. Yeah. So we fixed that and it's getting better and our ILL rejection rates are going down. Decided in advance whether to tip or remove your problem items that you find. So some staff was doing one thing, some staff was doing another thing, some weren't tipping or marking any books that were problem books. We started pulling them off the shelf and putting them on another shelf and then not got confusing. So if you're going to mark books that are a problem, they're coming up as being in the wrong location, having bad bar codes, wrong bar codes, they were damaged, whatever the problem is with the book. All of your staff needs to do the same thing. And it needs to go through the entire inventory process. Because when you go back later to find things, it makes it more difficult. What we learned was anything that was flagged by our ILS, we pulled and we put on our, we have a moving shelves in the back. We emptied those off and we used those for the problem books. We should have left them on the shelf and we should have just tipped them. Because when you go back later, it makes it easier to find them. And you know where they were from. Yeah. Cause I moved them and you got to bring them back to where they belong. Yes. So leave them on the shelf. Just figure out how you're going to identify them. And always start with your smallest collection. Buy a lot of those little flag things that. Yes. Postage. Yeah. The little flag you posted. We used just the strips we used for when new people are shelving books like the bright orange, bright green. Yeah. Some were tipping them, which I didn't mind that idea. But then if there were books that were accidentally tipped. Oh, sure. How did you know it was part of the process? Yeah. So a clear definition of how you're marking those books. And so tip, you mean the tipping them over. Yes. If you're going to put them on. And what if you have helpful, I would, I would suggest that back. If you have helpful patrons. Oh, I'm going to put this back. Now it was a discussion we had. So we didn't have patrons that were like, Oh, your books were tipped over and leave them alone. But flagging them with a strip would be that's the way. Yeah. We started with a small collection because we weren't sure what we were doing. And it was the first time we used Cersei horizon. And we were walking through this process with their tech support. Showing us how to do these different things. So they were very helpful. They were very helpful. You're not just doing this on your own. No. That's nice. And we were looking at like switching to blue cloud. We've finally gone to enterprise. So because we were changing things and all the staff was new. Cersei agreed to walk us through everything. So it's been great working with them. Allows for estimating time for completion. So if you do a small collection and you know that you had 200 books there, but you have 187,000 pieces, you can mathematically figure out how long it should take you for inventory. Allows for errors and correcting them before moving forward. So we were not using the right collection code. We didn't know we had two different missing item collection codes. And so two different people did two small collections and then we went to compare the reports and we couldn't figure out. It wasn't matching up. Then we discovered we had two missing item collection codes. And we don't know where they came from. We fixed those before we moved on with the big collections. That goes into the cleaning up your unused or duplicate for some unknown piece. It was a little strange, but, and see what exceptions you may have forgotten. So if you made exceptions for books like our special collection, our rare book collection, it helps with that as well. But starting with a small collection is the best idea. And even if it's, if you don't have a really small collection, I would take like 10 or 20 books and make a special collection and then run it in the inventory on that. Take it and do a prep for getting big. Yeah. Exactly. That's very important. So the process was prep for your inventory. One of the big questions is, do you want a report that tells you every book that's Michelle's? So Sierra C. Dynex says do not do that because your stack of papers will be. Yeah. That seems like a way too common thing. Yes. So when I was at UNK, they did do Michelle reports. Yeah. Stacks of paper. So. And now what do you do with that? You have to go back to someone out to. So they take these bundles of pages of paper and walk out, find the books and put them where they belong. And it can take all your long to do that. So this is a constant thing. Yes. But do you have to decide whether you want to do that? How big is your collection? So we were too big. We did not run a Michelle report. We were just looking for items that were not cataloged correctly. Were not cataloged at all. Were returned and had not been checked in. Were missing and shouldn't be on the shelf or had been needed. Those kinds of things. Scan all the items and all collections in the inventory function. Do one full collection at a time. I do not recommend starting your adult fiction and coming back and doing it again. It creates individual files. And I mean, you can do it if you have to pause, but it's better if you can do it all at one time. And then you can't merge those files to say, here's the big. That was what we actually ended up for everything. You have to take that report and run it against the. The system. So. Yeah. So it means that this is a function in. Horizon. Yes. It does this. Yes. And you may not know another people may wonder, but I think it's probably in all a basic function of all. I've worked with triple. I, and Cersei dynamics, and they've all had an inventory function. So you should be able to find something in your system. Yes. Yes. I know some people say, well, I don't have their system. So I don't know what exactly. Yeah. Ask and call their tech support. Honestly, I just went and found the help pages and looked it up and I printed off the user manual. And there was the inventory function. And there was the collection. So we have an error reports for each collection. So do individually. So we have adult fiction, large type of adult fiction mystery, adult fiction by genre. And we do those as a zone collection. Yes. Own collection, own error reports. Manually evaluate the materials on the error. So we literally took those pages and we highlighted. As we went and marked up every single book as we corrected the problems that occurred with the books. staff that's working on these because we split these reports up into eight different people. They have to use the same color markers. They have to mark the same way. They have to have the same rules and regulations for what they're doing and that they are indeed marking as they're fixing. Setting the rules before you start is very important with that. Yeah, that goes with this previous slide of figure out how you're going to do all of this at any time to make sure, yeah. You can't change it halfway through. You'll just ruin your inventory. But doing that small test collection, that would be when you could make changes. Figure out what you think is going to work. Try it on that small group and then fix all your issues that didn't work before you go for the full. And that is what we did. We wound up changing a lot of things between that small collection and the big ones. So evaluate your lost items. So again, we cleared ours all out. We just wiped because there were so many and you could tell from the year the item was catalogued or that it probably wasn't there anymore. So we just deleted all lost items and then re-enter things later. It was so much easier. Finalize the inventory. So when you do, I want to finalize this, you absolutely need to make sure that you are done. You have done it right and you really want this to happen because it's going to rewrite your database of items and that is your new inventory. So it yells at you and says, are you sure you really want to do this? Are you really, really sure? And you really, really, really need to be sure. So that is your real final, final thing. It's a very, very, yeah. So basically when patrons come to your catalog and they search for material, whatever you finalize, that is now your new catalog. And so make sure you got all your collections. You didn't forget about the one that's in the back room or it's in the processing room and you forgot about those books. That's one of the things I didn't mention in here. We had to go around the library and I had to come to your office and say everything we own needs to come out of here and go backwards. If you've got something for your personal use, yeah. Because I didn't realize that our children's department had, I don't know, like six different staff members had stacks of books on their desk and they were checked out to children's programming. So we put everything back. Yeah, everybody has to put it. Everybody has to put it back. So then your final step. So that makes me think then. Before you did all this, was there a big push to the patron saying return all your checked out items? No. Did you just base that on the system will say what's checked out and we'll just trust that that's all correct. Okay. We thought about that. Our patrons didn't want any part of it. We asked. So that would be, I think, something, you know, a frustrating for them. Yeah. And so because we also wound up eventually on work waiting fines and fees, we were able to find those items that were checked out to patrons, but weren't really there and they just didn't exist anymore. And so we cleaned those out as well. But so we, yeah, it's a fun process. So far the inventory is trusting that what says it's checked out is actually checked out. And Circee told us just you just have to roll out on that because there's no way if you want to make all your people check everything in, it'll take months. And then you have months for the patrons being upset that they can't check stuff out. And then you have to close because if you're open people will be taking stuff. So we we did not mess with that. So your last step after you get all of your processes done is to upload your final inventory to OCLC. So why that is important is if you do interlibrary loan, your catalog that you have in your ILS system that document or file listing needs to match that file that's at OCLC and ours does not. So we are in the process right now working with OCLC to do a batch upload or file rewrite. It's called a reclamation. And depending on how you do the process, most of it's free. But if you Yeah, I was wondering if that was still the case that it was pretty much a free. They want things updated. Correct. And on their side as well. So they're willing on that a lot of times to just do that all. So that's a process for free for the first time. Yeah, the first time if you're just taking a file and uploading it to them and saying here's my new items make that my new catalog, they don't charge for that. But if you give them a new file, they run the new file against an old file, they come up with a list of items that are conflicting. And then if you want the opportunity to review that conflicted file, it's going to cost money and it's based on the number of records that you have. So we are going to do that because Laura would like to see that list. And she's going to review the list. And then we're going to say, okay, now make that new list our current list. Sometimes. Yeah, it's worth it to take that extra and pay a little bit that you might need to for that. Definitely. And if you're wanting to be doing inventory and have it be accurate, you might as well practice the whole thing. And she wants the opportunity for collection development also. So she's going to use that list of what's no longer OCLC and say, Hey, do we need to replace that? We need to buy more of this collection. Because we have some theft going on. We didn't have our door system turned on security security. And then there were a lot of items that hadn't been bar or stripped. So we had a lot of loss. And so we're fixing that as well. So, yes. Well, let's see. So do's and don'ts. This was so somebody had a question, actually, that was asked before they did this one. They want to know if you're any assets, do you use, does your library use RFID? We do not use RFID. We are still old school. And we'll probably stay that way for a while. With our expansion project going on, we can't do a conversion right now. Oh, right. Yeah. So they've got the king has other things going on with a building expansion. So yeah, it's probably good. I need to do this before that so that you know what we need now for the new space. Exactly. So we we had to get this done because there are text moves, you know, or footprint. Sure. And we should really give it to them. So and like I said, we reached capacity over Shelby. And I needed to explain to people why you needed a bigger building. And that helps. So is that something you're thinking of maybe for teachers? I know some libraries do some are like, no, we don't. Our staff wants nothing to do with it. It's it's working the way it is. And I understand how RFID works. I absolutely wanted to move to RFID because of all the presentations I've been to a conference, all the videos I've watched, they say when you do shelf reading, you can just run down the shelf with a little barcode on it. It'll just sense they'll just grab it. It doesn't do that. So that pretty to the local public libraries. I've been out to visit. They're like, yeah, it doesn't work that way. That's like you still have to pull each book down and scan. You don't just get a run down the aisle and it reads everything. So the benefits of RFID, I get it, but for the cost and our staff not wanting to do it, we don't want to do it. So do's and don'ts do have a plan laid out in advance and do one collection at a time. Do not differ from your plan. That's why you get your staff together in advance and you talk through the process. And I used everybody, we all got together and talked about different things because Laura's the head of our technical services. Kelly's our IT guy. Alyssa's the adult services manager. Well, none of us think the same. We all have different brains. And as we walked through the process of how to do this plan in advance, it changed hundreds of times because somebody said, well, what about this? Well, what about this? Well, what happens? That's good to have other eyes on it. I think, yeah. So you don't just have your tech services person or just your catalog or whatever. You bring everybody together because they all look at the system differently and they all use the catalog differently. So we even asked some patrons questions. Some of our regulars again all the time, we asked them questions about how do we do this? What have we did this? What would this do to you? So get a plan laid out. Do go through your user manuals and training with your ILS before you start. That was the best part about Seercy Dynamics. We had been working with them so closely. We told them what we were thinking about doing. They said, hey, let us set you up with our tech guy and he's going to run through this inventory training with you to make sure you have everything you need. And we didn't pay for it. It was a service that they provide so that your system's correct and it works right. Their goal was to make sure that Verizon's doing everything we wanted to do. So that was great. Do write down your session number if you're using Horizon and use the correct location codes. So because we had two different missing item codes, at the end we had 257 books that were listed as not in the right location and barcode it incorrectly and we couldn't figure out what they were because they were in the right collection missing item but like it was 173 instead of 174 or whatever. So we determined we didn't realize we had another collection code. So use the right codes and then use your the session number is extremely important because if you do a partial part of collection, so you do adult fiction, you do a third of it, then you do a third and a third, each one of those has a different session number. And when you go to run that full inventory at the end, you have to put all three of those numbers in and say, if you get one, this is my collection. So in Horizon Seriously Downing, that's important. Place new books in place. Oh yeah, so leave the books on the shelf. Don't pull them off and move them to other places. That was our biggest mistake. Leave them in place and flag them however you're going to do it. Put the strips, sticky notes, you're going to mark them on the side with a marker or whatever you're going to do. Leave them on the shelf throughout the inventory process but flag those books and mark them somehow because you're still going to be open that your patrons can't remove it or take it away and you won't know what that item needed to be fixed. So that's important. We could use a lot of people. Now with the items that are flagged, now did you actually end up flagging or just doing it? We pulled them off and we moved them to a different area. I was wondering if you had things that were flagged and someone went to check one out, right? How would that work? I mean with the person checking out say, oh wait, I need to do something special because this is one of the books that we needed. There's a problem. That's actually why we pulled the books because we didn't want patrons checking them out, but moving them to a different location was more problematic than leaving them on a shelf. But we should, if you're going to leave them on the shelf, you have to figure out how to flag that item. So if it's going to get checked out and has a slip, you should put a note that whenever it returns it needs to go to catalog. If you're going to take an extra day of your inventory process and stay closed and then fix the problems, you can do that also. So it's, we moved them because we didn't want patrons checking them out, but then they cost a bit more trouble than leaving a little bit. Yes. Don't start an inventory and leave it unfinished. So when we got started, we started to do our inventory and we found all these weird reports listed in Cersei Dynex under inventory, but they were all dated from 2014. And we thought, okay, so somebody tried this before, no big deal. Well, because there were pre-existing reports sitting in there when we went to do our final inventory, it pulled those reports in. So don't start an inventory and leave it unfinished or at least go in and delete out old inventories before you start a new one. It will cause problems in new reporting. So did you figure out what was happening? We had to call Cersei Dynex and they're like, oh, somebody started this in 2014 and left the files sit there. So they went in and stripped those files for us. Okay. But it was a mess. It really caused a lot of problems. Don't underestimate the time. We did two full days of scanning and still had to come back and do more several months of cleanup, eight months total. We haven't even gotten to the special collection yet. So this is still a process? Yes, we're still going on. Don't try to rush this. Don't think it's going to happen overnight. Be patient with the process because when you're done in the end, it will make everybody's life easier to have your collection be correct. And it will save a lot of problems with patrons yelling at staff or patrons being upset because your service is not good or you sending somebody a fine because they put a book in the book drop and it's on the shelf and et cetera. So it does good things for you. So just be patient with the process. But making sure that all the staff is doing the same thing is key to this entire process. If they're going to scan items, they're scanning them in the same way. One of the problems with Horizon, I can say for sure, I don't know about some of the other systems. Sometimes the barcode scanner will be and it seems like it scanned the book. But if you're not watching the screen, it actually didn't scan the book. It picked up the barcode on the book, like the one that comes with the book. Not your barcode. So it didn't actually register anything because it doesn't recognize it. So we told staff, when you're doing this, you will scan and we had two people, one scanning and one staring at the computer screen to verify that if you're scanning, it's actually scanning. So go slow, take the time, make sure your staff's doing it the same, train before you start and encourage your staff that they have questions to ask, but they all need to be doing it the same way. So that's my do and don'ts. I wanted to leave time for question and answer because I figured you guys had some. And we couldn't cover everything, but our picture was here in the end. We used a book card. We had little tablets with USB scanners and or we had iPads, both of them. And we just took that cart and moved off and down the shelf. So we had one person sitting at the cart watching the screen and one person with the scanner scanning the items. I was wondering how you did the actually physically getting out there. So this is how we did it. We used book trucks. Everybody had a book truck. Our friends in the library group came in and prepared like a seven course meal for us for lunch. It turned out to be like a staff building day. So we built in lunch and it was a good time for us to get together. You know, everybody just talk. And then the far left shows the one person with the book truck watching the computer screen and one person scanning. And it's if you have the one three of having two people at a time, it makes it easier. But if you don't, one person could do this, but they have to watch the screen as well just to make sure you're getting everything. So you said a lot of this, you said something about you did things on the weekends. Yes, we closed for Saturday and Sunday. Okay. And we came in like eight in the morning and worked to five at night for two days straight. Okay. So that was just a one shot thing. One shot running through the whole building. Okay. And then after that was all of the follow-up. Yes. Now what we do with all the stuff that everything we found out. Exactly. So we met after lunch. RIT and Laura, they ran all the error reports and there were stacks and stacks and stacks and stacks of error reports. And we figured out what we were going to do with them, who all was going to work on them. And we talked about, you know, marking them and flagging them when you're done, marking off when you've corrected a book. If something's missing that you're noting that the book was not on the shelf and we can't find it anywhere. And then we took that list and we took all the stuff we could find and deleted it. We took the things that were in the wrong place and put them in the right place. And anything that was listed as bad bar codes, we redid the bar codes over the call numbers. There was a lot of different types of errors that came out and you just start with one type and you just work through all your reports and you fix everything as you find it. Have to be very deliberate and slow and step back. Very slow. No, yeah. And that's a hard thing. Cattlewoggers, you know, today we're all get done, get done, go fast, get, you know, fast. You gotta get everything out there. Yeah. I had to stress to stop that this was not a sprint. This was a marathon. And I needed them to slow down and double check their numbers and take time. I know everybody just wanted to get done at the end, but we had to go slow. And cataloging had to be very deliberate about what they were doing. What was the point in doing the inventory if you weren't going to be deliberate about it? Right. And then hopefully, this is the one time we have to do this huge project, I guess. And afterwards, it'll be made available. It will. And once we get that file uploaded to OCLC, finally, it'll help with everything. But we've been manually deleting things as we go along and find them. So our federal rates gone down for Interlibrary Loan. Right. So if anyone has any questions, go ahead and type them into the questions section. We did have a couple that came through while we were talking, ones that weren't answered. So type them in there. I'll grab them. And we can ask. We got plenty of time here for that. Just one thing I will say that someone did ask about that. Yes, these slides will be made available afterwards. So if you didn't want all of Tina's information, the do's and don'ts, and tips and tricks and everything. When the archive is posted, these slides will be uploaded and posted as well. So you'll be able to download them for your own taking. Yes. Keep in track of what you're doing. So go ahead and do that. Take us in some questions. So inventory. This is a, you know, you did this huge project once. Now, is this the kind of thing that you would do as a regular thing? And they, you know, obviously you do it once. We figure out everything we have. Great. Do you have any idea or expert advice on when you should do it again? Don't a lot of research. How often is that supposed to be done? Yeah. You should do it yearly. Oh, gosh. But nobody I know has the staffing or the time to do this yearly. So we're hoping to do this body early. And every two years we want to do a full inventory. It just makes the staff's lives easier. Right. And I think I would hope after this big one where you had so many problems, because it hadn't been done in 20 plus years, it will be quicker each other time you do it because you will not come across as many errors. And things seem ideally that needs to be fixed. That's our goal is we'll go from this many error reports to this many. Yeah. So, and we learned a little bit about our own selves. That's how we learned that we had like four or five different cataloging styles on the shelf. So we learned about our own collection, which was wonderful. And we saw things that were a lot of damaged items that we were able to replace and get new that helped as well. I know I worked in a library years ago, back in New York, a law library that was doing, we're doing the barcode project about going, it's just I've been in the library world for a while, yeah. They were in barcoding for the first time ago, you know, as a child. And we did go through every single book. It was very interesting to learn what was in the collection. Depending on how you do it, you sometimes get caught up in, this is a really interesting book. Oh, crap. How long I've been sitting here? And yeah, so maybe having a partner is a better idea. Don't do it because I was out there alone. We used to send to our own area to do the barcodes and yeah, that was not maybe not the best because you got distracted by, I didn't know we had this information. But then that's also kind of a nice side effect of it. Is that now for readers advisory or just what you're patrons asking for, you'll somebody will know, actually, I just know, my head that we happen to have a section that you know where it's at on that. We learned through the process that our sections like technology, medical, especially diabetes, mental health, the technology, what was the other big one, law. So as we're doing the inventory, you kind of just noticed things and I started noticing that the date of publication was like 1950, 1960, 1970. And so you, as you're doing this entire section, you realized you can just quickly look back over and see you have no current material on law. And so we started identifying, making little notes about the section needs replaced, the section needs replaced. You don't want to do too much. I think Laura, someone's very interested in this for the collection development side of information. Yeah, because we can run reports out of Circe Dynex that show us items that are not circulating or haven't circulated in five years, 10 years, 20 years, or you can run reports about the analysis of your collection. So you can look at the average age, the average checkout period, the average years that hasn't checked out. There's a lot of different reports you can run, but if your inventory is poor, all your reports are worth less. Yeah, if it's not accurate, it's actually out there. No, it's not. So. All right, I have a couple of questions. Yes. Okay, I'm not sure about the question. How do you find items that for some reason disappeared from the collection? That was a tough one for us. We ran that lost and missing item report and it was very thick, by the way. We basically just had to chalk it up that these things are gone because we spent hours trying to find things and we were finding nothing on the list, but they also weren't attached to any patrons record. Yeah, where they checked out. We have no idea. Yeah. So there's nothing you can do about that. So we literally just removed them off. We took the entire list and just deleted it from the catalog and then as we found things on the shelf over time that weren't in the catalog. Now you know. We added back, but it was so miniscule on the stuff that we added back. But basically we didn't have any door security for a long time. Right. So lots of our stuff walk right out the front door. But now we turned our gates back on and put security strips back in our items have stopped leaving. So that will hopefully be resolved. But it's hard as a librarian who is the keeper of the stuff to say there's nothing I can do about that. We just need to take it out. I just want to find it so badly. I'm ready to go. It's got to be here somewhere or I can find that person who took this out and can't you just have to? I mean, it's a cause of doing business. Exactly. It's a similar kind of thing. Yeah. And like Crystal knows that the commission and I at my library, we're all doing 20 and 30 different jobs at a time and you don't have time for this. So you have to prioritize. We tried it and our staff after a couple of hours was like nothing on this list is here. We've looked everywhere. So we're finding like it's not worth it. Just delete the list and we'll fix it later. I think that's the smart way is just delete the things and then when you do just find them as you're doing and the person of the inventory, they know, hey, yay, put it back in. We found something. And I should note that missing and lost inventory. So those are reports that Searcy Dynamics has available through Verizon and Symphony. But we have our catalog set up under settings that says after so many days, the item moves to lost. After so many days, the item moves to missing and then it just lives on the missing list. That should be reviewed every year. So our problem was it had never been reviewed. So this missing and lost items report was humongous. So nobody reviewed it. So if you have something listed as missing, nobody ever went through, okay, well now that we've determined it's missing and not coming back, we need to work on replacing it. That step wasn't being done. We were not doing that. So that's the first step we made was Laura and Alisa kind of decide what materials do we need to replace. And those were very long lists. And once they got that part of it done, then we just deleted the missing and lost items. All right, next question here. Ah, I've been weeding our collection before doing an inventory. Is that what you would recommend? I'm finding books that haven't been checked out for 20 or more years. Wow. So yeah, I don't think you mentioned about weeding. Is that something that hadn't been it? Well, you just talked about how old some of the books were. So I guess it had been done. So did you do that? Or was this kind of as part of this that? We had a unique scenario occurred our library. I won't go into detail, but we had a situation where somebody decided to weed 7,200 pieces of material. And that was fine. But they didn't remove it from the catalog. And they didn't take it out of OCLC. So got rid of the books. They just got rid of the books. So that is where this entire process came from was we quickly learned that after I started and started doing some evaluations on the collection. If you are going to weed before you do inventory, you absolutely must make sure that you're completely deleting it from your catalog. And you're pulling those items at OCLC. Yeah, if you're not weeding correctly, you can cause a lot of problems with inventory. So that's where our issues came from was somebody had weeded but did not remove from the ILS or OCLC. So but if you weed first, you have less books. That's true. Yeah, that's a good thing. So that is a good idea. I definitely recommend if it's not something you've done as a regular, which is the thing that's a whole other show. Yes, it is. We didn't should be a regular process. But if you haven't done or as you were saying Kimberly here in preparing for a actual inventory that may be a good time to do an extra hard push on it. Yes, to make your inventory easier. And we started looking at that and that's when we realized that we had over 7200 items that had been removed without being deleted. So how did you find out was it running the reports? It was running the reports and then we started talking about how is this possible. And so once we pinpointed it on the collections and the item types, that's when we realized that we had a serious problem and we're like, forget it. We're just going to run the inventory and fix it. It's nice that the old books are off the shelves, but so props for that. But you've got to go through the other steps as well to make it useful for people using your catalog or your OCLC holdings. And we are reading now and reading is a difficult topic, you know, you said it's its own show, but it was necessary. And so I just gave the staff like a pitch to say to patrons as we're going out there and pulling these books, this is why we're doing it. So they're all saying the same thing repeatedly to patrons, we need to make room for new books. If you want new adult fiction, we have to get rid of old or shelves are full. Now, you know, there's libraries all across the brass, but the shelves are just busting at the same place. But patrons want new stuff, but don't touch the old stuff. Yeah, you can't have both. So we gave analogies like you have a canister on your counter and it's got sugar in it and the sugar is getting really old, you need to replace it. We have to dump the sugar out to put new sugar in. So we had to find ways that our patrons could comprehend what we were trying to do. This is why this has to be done. Yes, absolutely. And there is, as you mentioned, even though years was causing problems, the books not being on the shelves in your library does not mean they're not available to you. That's what interlibrary loan is all about. Absolutely. Every library does because we have interlibrary loan, it's awesome that every library does not have to own everything. Right. I can always get it for you. Come back in a week. You've got the book. It's a I love interlibrary loan. Yeah. When I was at UNK, they were number two in the state behind UNL for interlibrary loan and it saves your budget. Oh, absolutely. And everybody's like, put your cost to ship the books back and forth. Yeah, but you can get 20 books for that cost. Yeah. And you get credits in OCLC and here in Nebraska at least from the Nebraska Library Commission. We actually have a extra program, the lender compensation program here that we've gotten monies from the state legislature to encourage libraries to loan. And the reports, we get them of how much they've loaned and you get a little extra credit from us too. Cash. Cash money. It's kind of nice. Let's get those two. Yeah. So and even if you don't have an extra one, OCLC does the same thing. You get credits on your OCLC bill for lending and you pay for cataloging something or whatever, but then you get credits for lending depending on how well you do. You might come out and do that. Exactly. And I think it's a great thing for like three months of bigger library in Dodge County. It's the biggest so we can help out North Bend and Arlington and Valley. And I think if we work together, you know, we're all suffering budget cuts. And that's how we resolve it. Isn't a library loan and sharing with each other? We start sharing help everybody help each other out. Absolutely. All right. So hopefully some of those 20 more 20 books have been checked out for 20 years and getting rid of the job. And I hope those aren't the kind of books that people say, but you can't. Yeah. Check it out. If you want us to keep it. And I'll be honest. Nostalgia is not a way to run the library. The patrons only notice your reading stuff when you're doing it. So you just wait till they're not there and then you can read it and they don't even notice. So you just do it after hours or and if you are going to read, don't take your books out to the alley and throw them in the dumpster. You've seen so many. You've seen the news stories. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Don't do that. And if you are reading books, make sure you check with your local recycling company. We just found out that they're no longer taking books with covers. So we're now cutting covers off. Right. So some do some don't. But this is no, you know, Omaha company and they still, they won't take books with covers. So the hardcover or also softcover or hardcover, which is the hard covers. Okay. So hardcover. You have to cut the glue and the spine off and then recycle the pages. Can't go through the same process for their cycling afterwards. So that's a whole nother show. Yeah, totally. Yes. All right. All right. Any other questions anybody have? We have about five minutes left officially for today's show. If you want to get any last minute questions in, get them typed in now. So you can answer them. But otherwise, you can always reach out to our library. Good. You know, came over a library, Google it. Yes. I'm just going to go in there. No problem. Any other last minute little notes you want to tell everyone about? Trying to think. So you're all, you're not done with this process. We're not done. And we're still working on it. Just know it's trial and error. It doesn't have to go perfect the first time. You're going to make mistakes. That's what we learned. And if you've never done an inventory, it's extremely difficult to do the very first one. Right. So just be patient with yourself, with your staff. Just make sure everybody's really communicating and talking to each other. As I was saying, communication, especially when you're bringing the entire staff on board of people who maybe never weren't involved, aren't the catalogers who are involved with that, they may think, that's not my thing, but it is. It's everybody's. And everybody, they take ownership of the whole process in the library a lot more, I think, after being so deeply involved in what's actually here. It changed the staff's attitude. I absolutely have no doubt about that. They really cared more about the collection. And just know that inventory, like I said, for OCLC, you're paying based on your records that they're holding. Yeah. So if you're going to want that to be definitely. Yes. And any way to cut money is a good thing today. So and OCLC, they won't charge for deleting things. So that's awesome. So if you keep up with your Azure, once you get this done, then you keep up with when you need something you have it written down, you do this, you take it out of our catalog, you take it in there too. Exactly. It's an ongoing thing and you'll always be, you know. You keep that clean inventory and just make sure your library runs smoother and then you can focus on other things like strategic planning and annual reporting and expansion projects. So. And summer reading. And summer reading. And summer reading. We're all in the middle of right now. Exactly. I appreciate you coming here when it's the middle of. I was glad to get out. That's okay. They made that's a good thing. Yes. Escape from the chaos. Yes. It's been quite hectic. So it's been wonderful. Love the door counts, but it's summer reading. All right. All right. Well, no urgent desperate questions have come in while we've been chatting the last few minutes here. So I think we'll wrap it up. Okay. Then we're just about to 11 o'clock. So if you do have any questions, yes. Look up Tina Walker, King of War Library, Fremont, Nebraska, F-R-E-M-O-N-T for those of you that don't know. Yes. It's not this way. And don't just Google Fremont because you'll get California. Oh yeah. Don't ask them. Well, maybe they do. Cataloging or maybe I've done it. It's not going to be. But yeah, they'll be confused by you. All right. So thank you very much. You're welcome. Thanks for having me. Yeah. This is awesome. I'm glad we got on the show. This is a session that I had seen at actually our state annual conference last year. There's some thank yous coming in too soon. This is very informative and helpful. Oh, very good. And thought it would be people definitely going to need to know more about this is something similar to reading and lots of other things. It just needs to be. So I'm going to pop out of here to show you. So we have been recording the show, as I said, and here is our Encompass Live website, nlc.nabresta.gov slash Encompass Live. You can also search us, Google us at your, in your search engine of choice, you just type in Encompass Live. So far we're the only thing called that on the internet. Oh, good. So you'll come up with our page here. These are upcoming shows. But I want to show you for today's archive. This is where it'll be at the bottom of all the upcoming sessions we have. We have our archives as a bring you to our archive page. Today's show will be on the top of the list here. This is Reverse Order by Dates, the most recent one's top. And we'll have the recording of the show and the slides that we posted there. This one was last week's. You can see we had a recording and a presentation to do the same thing. So you have a link to our YouTube channel and the slides that will be uploaded. I'll show you too while we're here. This is actually the 2018 is the 10th year of Encompass Live. I know I wasn't as surprised. So we do have our archives here going all the way back. And I'm going to scroll down here. So close your eyes if you get a little dizzy. It is all of our archives going back to the very first show, which was January 2009. Meet the NLC. So we do have everything here. So do keep that in mind as you are looking through our archives. Just see everything is dated though. So you will know exactly when the show was originally broadcast. You will find information here, of course, because it is historical. That is old outdated. The project might be over. The websites, the links might not work anymore. But we are librarians, so as we do is we archive things. So they're here and they're always going to be here as long as the internet is out there. So I'm going to scroll back up now. So close your eyes. Don't want to get dizzy. And we do have, if you noticed, a search feature at the top now. So you can search through so many archives. You can do a search now here through all the sessions or just the most recent 12 months if you want something new that will search all the information in a session. So the presenter, the topic, descriptions, all the words in the description. So if you want to look for something particular, you can do a search and get just the ones that are relevant to what you're looking for. So that will wrap it for today's show. Everyone who is here who attended today and registered for today's show, you're going to email from me hopefully just later this afternoon when the archive is ready. And when I posted it into that page, as long as YouTube cooperates and gets uploaded all quickly enough, I'll let y'all know when it is available. But as I said, all of these, both our live show and our archives are free and open to anyone. So share your links out there. Let people know what you got coming up on the show. And come to the slide. We are also on Facebook. This is link we have to our Facebook page. So if you are a big Facebook user, give us a like over there. We post when new shows are coming up. Here's your reminder of logging in on the slides of today's show. When our archives are available, we post on here. Here's the announcement last week's archives. So if you are, do like to use Facebook and keep up on things, give us a like over there. And you'll keep reminded of what's going on in the show. Other than that, that wraps it up for today's show. Thank you everyone for attending. Thank you for being here. And we'll see you next time on Facebook and on the slide. Bye-bye.