Colgate University built an on-site ASRS in 2005 as part of renovating our
entire main library.  During the 2 years of construction on the building,
our services were dispersed among several buildings on campus and the
high-use portion of the collection that remained available to our students
during that  time was entirely housed in the ASRS, requested through our
online catalog, and delivered to our circulation point in utility vehicle
loads. Of course, we also made major use of the ConnectNY user-initiated
resource sharing and traditional ILL.  There was user dissatisfaction at
first, but one thing we learned is that patrons were greatly pleased when we
made a public awareness campaign to show them how to virtually browse the
stacks in call-number order using the OPAC.  The other thing we heard when
we moved back into our renovated building was that students were
disappointed that they had to go to the stacks and find the books
themselves! And faculty were disappointed when we stopped delivering
directly to their offices, of course - but we want them to come to the
library :) .  When we opened the new building, we brought up the Encore
discovery system, and blended it into the classic OPAC site as our keyword
search (classic indexes are still available in other tabs). Encore doesn't
have a virtual call number browse feature, but we have asked for this as an
enhancement - either a linear browse of the shelves, or a hierarchical call
number facet drill-down.

Cindy Harper, Systems Librarian
Colgate University Libraries
[log in to unmask]
315-228-7363




On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 10:01 AM, Emily Lynema <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I agree with Dan that it is a bit of a moot point to argue about the
> benefits of moving materials to off-site storage. It is absolutely going to
> happen. But here's the thing....it's been happening for years as we buy more
> and more e-books and digital collections. If the argument is that users need
> to be able to 'browse' the physical stacks, they've already been unable to
> discover digital materials in this way for some time now.
>
> But here's where I think this topic does tie in with NGC4LIB. The question
> we should be asking ourselves is "What are our patrons losing when we move
> our physical print materials off-site? Are there tools we can build to help
> them recover that usefulness in new ways?"
>
> It's for that exact reason that we are continuing to explore different,
> enriched ways to browse the collection virtually at NCSU, in addition to
> thinking about what enhanced delivery services we can offer to our patrons
> to make it easier and more reliable to get a book out of an automated
> retrieval system than it was to go find it in the stacks.
>
> I bet there are a lot of cool new discovery tools we could think about that
> way make both digital collections AND materials stored off-site accessible
> to our patrons.
> As for the use case that Tim pointed out, it seems like those materials
> should have been part of a reference collection of some sort. It goes
> without saying that as libraries contemplate major changes like these, our
> job is to be listening to our patrons so that we can learn what mistakes we
> might have made and remedy them. An interesting idea that has been tossed
> around here is to retain on open browsing shelves the materials most
> recently pulled from the ARS. Perhaps that would need to include materials
> most frequently pulled from the ARS, too.
>
> -emily
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Date:    Fri, 1 Oct 2010 13:46:24 -0400
> From:    Dan Scott <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: CSU library finds 40% of collection hasn't circulated
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 1, 2010 at 7:29 AM, Kyle Banerjee <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
>  >>
>>> >> "We're going to move out the books that are never checked out, the
>>> ones
>>> >> that are never used anymore,"
>>> >>
>>>
>>>
>> >
>> > I hope they're not relying exclusively on circ transaction data to
>> discover
>> > what is "never used." I realize this may sound insane, but a lot of
>> > materials are actually used *in the library* without being checked out.
>> The
>> > nature of the resource and the people who have a lot to do with this.
>> >
>> > Years ago, we did a major weeding and storage project at a place I
>> worked at
>> > did something similar. Just to be safe, we had the shelvers look at our
>> > proposed list which contained 10's of thousands of items to see if any
>> of
>> > them jumped out as things they recognized as materials that were used.
>> While
>> > most were not, there were certainly a number that were.
>>
>>
>
> That's not at all insane. In fact, we use our next-generation ILS
> (Evergreen - did y'all catch that valiant attempt to link this thread
> to the supposed topic of the mailing list?) to record in-house uses,
> and when we did our own PR-free move of items from the stuffed
> circulation stacks into storage this summer, we used a combination of
> lack of circulation since 1985 and lack of recorded in-house uses
> since 2003 to determine likely suspects for movement into storage.
>
> Of course, some patrons disobey the signs posted all around the
> library asking them not to reshelve the books and slip books back onto
> the shelves by themselves, evading an in-house-use statistic, but at
> some point you just have to accept that there is a possibility that
> one of those books will show up in your next generation catalogue with
> "Storage" in the copy location information and they'll have to ask
> someone to retrieve it for them. It seemed like a worthwhile risk for
> us to take, in return for breathing room on our stacks.
>
> -- Dan Scott Laurentian University
>
> --
> Emily Lynema
> Associate Department Head
> Information Technology, NCSU Libraries
> 919-513-8031
> [log in to unmask]
>