Giving new life to old physical library collections with contemporary mobile technology

Abstract

A common practice in modern academic libraries is to move physical collections to storage facilities, and repurpose the gained spaces into functional, flexible and interactive research environments, that align with the sophisticated needs of 21st century students and researchers. It is however important to first establish what exactly is in your collection before you can identify and move any collection or part of it. This realisation motivated a project to compile an inventory of the physical collections in the University of Pretoria libraries. The fact that the collection was temporary static, due to Covid-19 lockdown restrictions, as well as developments presented by our library management system to integrate mobile technology in the inventory process, made it even more timely and sensible to take up this assignment. We started in August 2020 with the inventory process, but it soon became clear that we also need to catalogue old collection books, which were not on the library system, as part of the process. The objective of the project was to make the catalogue as perfect as possible, we therefore had to fix all other mistakes associated with the physical collections too (e.g., replacing old barcodes and spine labels, correcting circulation statuses, etc.). Our main goal was to ensure that what the user see on the library catalogue, is exactly what is found on the shelf. This will ensure improved user satisfaction and more efficient service delivery. Our initially thought was that the old books were not really needed anymore by our users, and that the key advantage of putting old collections on the system, would be to enable the identification of items that can be moved to off-site storage. We were however very surprised when we learned that soon after some of these old books were available on the system for library users to discover, they were requested and used. There is indeed value in giving new life to “dead” collections. As addressing the information needs of our students and researchers through our diverse and comprehensive collections is a strategic priority, we concluded that we had no choice than ensuring users were able to use these items – even though we thought they were old and of no use anymore! This presentation will describe how the benefits of integrated applications, mobile technology, as well as opportunities provided by an innovative library management system, in combination with teamwork and management support, were utilised to simplify an enormous process, with existing as well as forthcoming strategic value.