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A project called “ZSR Library Inventory” began ever so quietly back on July 19th, 2001 with a hand-held scanner, an Access database, and the tireless dedication of Patrick Ferrell and ZSR student employees. I am glad to report that, a mere six and half years ( and two complete building inventories) later, we have narrowed our list of missing books down to a mere 4,669 out of 1,625,821 items. That comes to a mere .29% of our collection! While I wish that I could say that that means that a student looking for any given book on our shelves has a probability of 99.71% of finding that book, at least I can say that we have scanned every bar-coded book in this library twice. . .and that is quite an accomplishment!
This morning, I set the Voyager item statuses of all of those items to “Missing” and set a statistical category that tells us these items were missing as of our inventory on 02/2008. This project saw the work of many people over the last six years but the weight of work fell on Patrick who somehow kept this project going through software and data errors, system migrations, and forgetful Systems Librarians.
2 Comments on ‘ZSR Officially Loses 4,669 Books’
Would Mr. Ferrell be willing to share with others how he set up the database and how he proceeded with the inventory?
Kitty-
You probably need to contact Erik Mitchell regarding this. He is our Systems Librarian and created the inventory program that was used and the databases. My student workers and I simply did the grunt work and I had little to do with the actual setting up of the inventory program and databases. Erik can be reached at 336-758-5797 or mitcheet@wfu.edu
Let me know if I can be of any further help to you.
Patrick Ferrell