Hey Friends!

This week, I realized I wasn’t ready to write about this post.

When last you heard from me, RFID tagging was coming to an end.last week at my library.

If you’ve been following me on my Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, then you’ve already seen our great progress!  If you’re just starting out on this thread of adventure, start with the first post here.

“So you weren’t ready to write this post?”

Well, I thought I was ready. I said that I would be discussing my final thoughts on tagging and inventory on this post, but I wasn’t planning on what happened next. Sure, some books would come in and need to be tagged, but I didn’t realize how many…

All four Jaws movies are on Netflix right now, BTW.

Books, DVDs, materials coming in left and right that need tagging…we turned one of our RFID carts from inventory into a mobile RFID command center to tag and program books as they come in. Add in the new books coming in, and you’ve got some work cut out for yourself.

BUT IT DOESN’T END THERE.

During the inventory, we couldn’t tell what books were marked lost, overdue, etc…this was purely tagging and programming, because we would come back for them later. You pretty much have three kinds of books in the mix:

• Lost Books: Books patrons supposedly never turned back in and got charged for
• Overdue books: Books that haven’t turned into lost books yet
• Blank ??? books: Books that have a barcode, but don’t exist in our records

Since blank books aren’t in our system, we don’t have a name to go on – just a barcode. How do we track down a single barcode? With a pretty clever idea: we look at the book that was scanned before the blank book, find that book and grab the book next to it. Easy, right? Super easy! Except there’s one problem:

WHAT IF THE BOOK NEXT TO IT WAS IN THE WRONG AREA?

If it’s next to 641.23 BLOK and that book somehow wound up in the 940’s, then finding it becomes incredibly more difficult. In other words, this adventure has only just started and my team and I have much to do!

How I feel when asked to track down lost books.

If you still have any other problems, questions, issues, observations or more, it’s not too late to ask me! Ask me on here, Instagram, Facebook or Twitter and I’ll cover them in next week’s post (for real this time).

That’s all for this week, stay out of the water…duh dum…duh-dum…

Justin Brasher, Brash Librarian