Missing Status Information Being Added to the ILS
The Collections Access, Loan and
Management Division (CALM) has begun a project to add missing
item
status information to the ILS for volumes missing from certain
areas of the General Collections. This work has been performed
in conjunction with the transfer of materials to the high density
storage facility at Fort Meade, Maryland. The areas
of the General Collections that have been selected for transfer
to Fort Meade are
PZ
3 - end of PZ |
MLCs |
Select items from CALM, the Law Library, Asian
Division and AMED Division |
*Note: An ambitious project to send additional copies of mongraphs
has been initiated in CALM. In cases
where
mulitple
copies
of an item exist on the shelf, the lowest
numbered
copy
is left
on
the
Hill and any additional copies are sent offsite to Fort Meade.
Certain criteria must be met before additional copies are sent.
For instance,
no multi-part mongraphs are sent and no items from the current
year
nor the three prior years are sent (except in the rarest of cases.)
This strategy provides an advantage to sending out blocks of materials
because
it provides
more immediate
relief to the crowded stack conditions by allowing for thinning
throughout the entire General Collections.
Baseline
Inventory Program (BIP) staff are currently entering missing status
information for items that cannot be located in these areas. The
baseline information comes from the Division's Negative Shelflist,
which is a card file of missing items that was created during a
twenty-year inventory of the General Collections, started in the
late 1970s. This information has never been captured systematically
in either the ILS or in the predecessor MUMS and SCORPIO systems.
Examples of such records can be seen by searching for the following:
- Chief Counsel, by
A.L. Furman
- The Armor Within
Us, by Joseph Samachson
In
the OPAC, the missing status indication appears on the item's status
line (Example: - Status: Missing-as of 06/29/2001 08:29
AM). The date showing on that line is the date that the missing
status was entered in the ILS - not the date that the item was originally
found to be missing. The 986 field in the holdings record (available
in the ILS Cataloging Module) indicates that the record was updated
as a part of this project and notes when the item was first found
to be missing during the inventory.
Caution: This project will only capture information
about missing copies. There will be no attempt made to verify or
input information about other copies of a work. In many cases, the
Library will have available other copies of a work, but only the
missing copy will now be displaying in the ILS. Eventually, as these
sub-classes of materials are transferred to Fort Meade, the existing
copies will be entered online and the Library's complete holdings
for these sub-classes will be displayed in the ILS. In the meantime,
no assumption should be made about the Library's complete holdings
of any particular work based on the fact that only one copy is displayed
in the ILS and that copy is shown to be missing. ILS Call Slip requests,
as well as traditional paper call slips, may still be submitted
for such works. CALM's Book Service staff will check the shelf to
determine if another copy is available.
The
Fort Meade facility opened on November 18, 2002. Approximately
3,500 items are being moved to the facility each day. As of November
2004, approximately 1,300,000 volumes from Capitol Hill have been
transfered to Ft. Meade.
Questions
or comments about the current Negative Shelflist project or about
the Fort Meade facility may be forwarded to Ask
a Librarian
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