By Ann Snowman, Access Services head
Thanks to a hardworking subgroup of the Access Services Council, the process to withdraw LOST and MISSING items has been reinstated following a multi-year hiatus. One of the 32 next steps of the Collection Retention report is to “Reinstate [the] Lost/Missing/Withdrawn/Purge process” which was suspended several years ago. A subgroup of the Access Services Council, charged to take up this task has offered their recommendations. The full step-by-step process has been described and is listed among Access Services’ Training Bulletins as bulletin 42 and bulletin 43.
The following is an overview of the process recently endorsed by the Collections Services Advisory Group:
On/about :
May 15: staff will run a report in Director’s Station identifying all items “Marked Missing” (an inventory designation, someone looked for it but it wasn’t there) and “Lost & Paid” (long overdue, billed and replacement fee paid) before the previous October, 7 months ago.
May 15 – July 15: one last search is made. Any item found will be recorded as such and leave the MISSING queue, returned to the shelf. Units will be encouraged to search routinely through the year so that found items clear the MISSING status as quickly as possible.
July 15: reports will be made available to selectors alerting them that missing items cannot be located or long overdue items were invoiced and a replacement fee paid resulting in a “LOST” status appearing in the catalog. Selectors may repurchase at their discretion.
October 1: all items remaining in the MISSING queue and the LOST & PAID queue will be migrated to the newly created library policy ZREMOVED where they will remain shadowed F.O.R.E.V.E.R.
Under this process no book/item will be moved to ZREMOVED before it has been missing one full year. All MISSING and LOST items will be searched at least once before they are moved to ZREMOVED. If a book/item returns after it has been moved to ZREMOVED it will be reinstated; the bibliographic record is never gone. A replacement copy will be added as “copy-2”. We will no longer purge item records as happened in the past.
When the report is run this year, it will number more than 20,000 items owing to the backlog. That number will be much lower in ensuing years. Given the large number of items requiring a final search the time line may move back slightly; no step will be implemented ahead of time.
Resources:
Training Bulletins 42 – Annual Procedures to Address Missing/Lost Items and 43 – Director’s Station –How to Create Lists of Missing & Lost Items: https://www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/access/intranet/trainingbulletins/bulletinsNUMERICAL.html
May 19, 2014, MediaSite Live training video: Missing Items Procedures: http://live.libraries.psu.edu/Mediasite/Play/d85939f78ca54e5793a871150423656c1d?catalog=8376d4b2-4dd1-457e-a3bf-e4cf9163feda Log-in with username: library, password: foster.