Hi all.

SFU library is planning a major weeding project, many tens of thousands of volumes spread across a floor of our library and we are on a tight deadline. (so not a lot of time for in-house development)  We're identifying lists of weeding candidates using a combination of tools including Alma (our ILS), Greenglass, spreadsheets, etc. The next step will be to send student shelvers into the stacks with booktrucks, laptops, and barcode scanners. The idea is that they'll have an application or interface that prompts them what to look for, sourced from a master spreadsheet without the ability to write directly back to Alma or the Master spreadsheet. They will scan barcodes to capture pulled items. In the case of missing items or other problems, we want them to take notes for future follow-up.

In the past we have done this kind of weed with paper lists. Trucks of books are pulled, lists are noted with problems, etc. Then the books go to tech services for re-wanding to create sets, and the inventory deletion can proceed. We know about applications like Book-Be-Gone. What's different about this weed is the scale. We'll be pulling multiple trucks of books every day. We need an efficient workflow that can handle this volume of weeds. Paper lists won't cut it.

We are looking for a tool that would draw from the Master spreadsheet that contains, on a per line basis, info about a single book.  What we envision is that the info about a single book, taken from a line in the spreadsheet, would display on a screen and the shelver would input some info, such as "yes, I pulled this book off the shelf", then, after they noted what they had done with the book, the info they inputted into the display would be written to the spreadsheet (a copy?), adding to the line on the spreadsheet that pertained to the book in question.  After the shelver was done inputting info for a single book, the display would proceed to show the next book listed in the spreadsheet.

We are interested in hearing from any libraries that have carried out a weeding project of this scale, bonus if you use Alma. 😊 What APIs, workflows, tools, (Alma features), etc. were you able to use to make things easier? Did you build additional applications for the staff, and did they integrate with Alma if you use Alma?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts or advice on this.

Janice


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Janice Banser, Systems Librarian

Simon Fraser University Library

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