Taking inventory uncommon among large libraries

Missing books seem to be a common phenomenon among university libraries, though some libraries… Missing books seem to be a common phenomenon among university libraries, though some libraries are better at keeping track of their inventories than others.

An unknown number of Hillman Library’s 6 million library books are missing, and this is due to a hole in the University Library System’s procedure that does not always update the status of missing books. It is unknown whether the missing books are in use somewhere in the library, shelved incorrectly or stolen.

In a Letter to the editor published earlier this month, Rush Miller, the Director of the University Library System, said that inventories are no longer routine activities for academic libraries of this size. He said that a library has to be closed for an inventory to occur and it is very time-consuming.

Since no inventory is taken, the Pitt’s library system does not know how many books are truly missing versus how many are reported missing. Penn State, Carnegie Mellon and West Virginia University all try to keep track of inventories in their main libraries, but as has the staff at Hillman, the schools’ librarians have found it to be a difficult, sometimes impossible, task.

Penn State’s Paterno Library at University Park has around 6 million books, roughly the same amount that the Hillman does. According to Ann Snowman, the associate librarian, however, the library keeps an ongoing inventory of all of its books, both located and missing, in the library’s catalog.

“The catalog is our inventory,” Snowman said. “There is no annual inventory done. That would be impossible.”

Penn State has 24 campuses, each with its own library. Some of the libraries do an inventory, some do not, Snowman said.

Hilary Fredette, the associate university librarian at the Downtown Campus Library at WVU, acknowledged how hard it is to keep an ongoing inventory of books in a library.

“The Downtown Campus Library, where I work, started doing an inventory about two or three years ago, and it’s an ongoing project going floor by floor,” Fredette said.

The Downtown Campus Library uses a piece of software that scans the bar code on every book and compares it to those for the books listed in the catalog that are not checked out.

“You can’t just count the books because you have to compare the books on the shelves to what books you should have,” Fredette said.

While Fredette did not know the exact number of missing books at the WVU library offhand, she said that the number is not very large.

The search process for WVU’s missing books involves marking a book missing and then marking it lost if it is not found within a few months. Once a book is marked lost, Fredette said the library administration has to decide whether to replace it or not.

Penn State’s Paterno Library has a comparable process for books that cannot be found.

“If we go to a shelf and don’t find a book, we mark it missing,” Snowman said. “Subsequent searches are made and after a certain period of time and a certain number of searches, if we can no longer find [the book], then we draw it from the collection, and it is no longer represented in the catalog or inventory.”

CMU’s Hunt library follows a similar missing-book procedure.

Matt Garfinkle, a student supervisor at Hunt Library, said that the library system does keep track of the number of books there, and anyone can search the catalog to find any book.

Garfinkle said that while employees do not constantly check to see what books they have and don’t have, there are usually not very many missing. While he did not have the exact number of books in the library, he was certain that an inventory system did exist.

“Typically, what we do after a book is overdue for 30 days is mark it as lost. After we search for the book three times, we mark it as missing and order a new book,” Garfinkle said.

The protocol for missing books at Hillman Library is a little different. When a patron notifies the lending desk of a missing book, the lending desk sends a status-check form to employees in Room 306. Room 306 employees help patrons find books when they do not know where to look or when the lending desk tells them a book is missing,It is only after an employee from the room cannot find the book that it is marked “missing” in the library system.

However, a problem arises when students looking for a book go straight to Room 306 instead of stopping at the lending desk first to see if a book is marked as “available” or “missing.” In these cases, if Room 306 cannot find the book, they do not fill out the status-check form, and the book is not marked missing.

In a previous article in The Pitt News, Fern Brody, the associate University librarian who works under Rush Miller, director of the University Library System, said that an inventory of Hillman Library has never been performed because it would be too massive a project. Based on their comments, Penn State and WVU library officials seem to agree.

Miller and Brody declined comment on this story.