Conducting a Catalogue Update

I confess, we update and overhaul our collection regularly, but our catalogue is another story altogether. It is beautifully maintained when new resources are added or when we cull or move things, but over the years it has become a historical repository for outdated information. Much of it is from before my time that we’ve just not had the time to investigate. Things like sections that are acronyms that don’t mean anything to me, or sites that have been removed but the resources never taken off the system. We also have an international school where students come only for a short time, are automatically added to the system, but we are not informed when they leave, so we end up with hundreds of student records for students we no longer have at the school.

Starting the update

So, this year, one of my goals and direction for the year was to refocus on the basics, and that included doing a full catalogue overhaul. We’ve only just started and have a long way to go, but it feels amazing to be getting onto this task that’s been on the to-do list for ages.

To make this achievable when there’s so much to do, we are just doing it a little bit at a time, and it will more than likely take the whole year, fitting it in around regular tasks. There are three of us working on this project, myself, my amazing library technician in the secondary school and our brilliant library assistant, whose increased hours this year is making this project possible.

Users and borrowers

We’ve started with borrowers. Ensuring staff are in the right groups so they have correct access to LibPaths. We can’t remove old accounts as they are automatically reimported, but at least the current staff have the correct viewing rights. We then moved onto students, making sure all students were in the correct year levels and removing those past students, disabling their accounts.

Settings

I then started to dive into the settings. There are so many features and settings that sit there and many I’ve not touched before. I went through all the settings, learnt about a few things I didn’t know about, like popular search history, and turned on some things like user reviews.

I’m also making it my practice to not just quickly go in and do something, but to take the time to look around and do a more thorough tidy up. For example, in week 4 when it was time to turn on the overdue emails, instead of just flicking them on, I took the time to read through every email template, edit and update it and check every email setting. I also asked our tech team to update our parent contact setting import, and they’ve been able to automate this now, so that happens automatically.

Sites and Sections

Next up on the list is sites and sections. Our main library ones are all correct, but we have a historical backlog of sites and sections that were created for spaces around the school. Some of these don’t exist anymore and the resources removed, so we will go through each, check, delete and remove or rename.

Then it’s onto lost and missing books. Many have been marked as lost or missing when students leave or stocktake is completed, but not all have been replaced or removed from the system. So we will run a full report, remove, replace and then be able to start fresh.

LibPath and homepage overhaul

We have just under 300 LibPaths – research pages and information portals. The ones that are turned on are updated, but there are plenty sitting there that are no longer needed or need to be updated. I update them when they are turned on, but the really old ones need to be deleted and there are outdated ones, like our yearly book week pages, that also need to be removed. I also need to do a more thorough update and overhaul of our landing pages. I update these each year, but I’m feeling like it’s time for a bit of a refresh in a bigger way. I enjoy the creativity of the design process. I also want to make our research and information literacy pages more thorough and easier to navigate, so that’s a bit of a longer-term project.

Our project will align with stocktaking procedures we carry out later on in the year, as well as with ongoing deselection and weeding processes.

It feels amazing to finally start this project. It’s been a long time coming and will take the year, but it will be so good to have a clean slate from which to work.