Ryann sitting behind a book truck ready to inventory.
Have you ever wondered how a library keeps track of all its materials? How do they know what they have and what is missing? How do they decide what to keep and what to acquire? The first step is to conduct an inventory. An inventory matches the barcode to the library catalog and marks items that are not scanned missing. The American Library Association recommends conducting inventories annually and the last inventory of our circulating collections happened in 2016! That was a long time ago and many things have changed since then.
In March 2026, the library was closed for a week to the public for a large archival processing project, so what better time to conduct an inventory of the main stacks. The weeks leading up to the inventory I, Jess, bought extra barcode scanners, broke down the collection into sections, and assigned those sections to myself, the other librarian, and winter intern. I wrote a short workflow for us to follow- scan everything in your section in order, pull anything that needed to be corrected, and keep moving.
The tools to inventory are a laptop and a scanner.
During this time, we plugged in our headphones, set our computers up on the book trucks, and got to scanning. Methodically we scanned item after item and put the ones that needed to be checked after the inventory on the book truck. After four days of scanning, we inventoried 8,000 items in our Special Collections, Main Stacks, Juvenile, Oversized, and AV collections, but that was just the beginning.
Michaela busy scanning books.
Once the inventory was finished, I pulled two reports of titles that were not inventoried and marked missing. We spent another day looking for the missing items in our Rare Book Room, Reading Room, and the basement. Books that we found we inventoried and the ones we didn’t will be added to our missing search next quarter. The final step of the inventory was to correct all the books we pulled off the shelves. There were about 200 books and DVDs that needed to be corrected in our catalog. Most of these items had incorrect call numbers but some needed to be added to the catalog. After they were corrected, they were returned to the shelf.
I found the whole process deeply satisfying. There were clear goals and objectives, and we did one step at a time. I can’t be the only one who likes to check tasks off a list and have something to show for it at the end, right?
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September 21, 2026
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Last updated: September 21, 2026