Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Lost items are visible in WorldCat

Items that were hidden from the public (masked/shadowed) in the old catalog, such as lost books, can't be hidden in WorldCat Local.

In WorldCat you might run into lost books like this one:  Zunker, V. G. (2012). Career counseling: A holistic approach. Belmont, Calif: Brooks/Cole.

The detailed record says "We were unable to get availability information for this item. Please check at the circulation desk for assistance" instead of call number, availability, and location.

Follow the advice and check with the Circulation desk. They'll figure out the status of the item. If it's a book that's been declared lost, proceed as you normally would when we don't own it: suggest ILL (if it's not a textbook) or offer to look for the item in other local libraries.


Librarians, if you're super interested in tracking something down yourself, feel free to look it up in WorkFlows.  Terry says we should have access to that system through December.  Keep in mind, Workflows will have outdated availability info, outdated holdings, and outdated circ stats.

Cataloging deleted as many lost item records as possible before sending our holdings to OCLC.  But ASD wanted to keep records for all lost/missing items that have outstanding fines.

Mary Jane expects that there will be a "lost items" clean up project after Access Services has been able to verify that records for lost and missing items are connecting properly to patron records. IMO, there are other projects that Access Services will be working on, too, and I don't know their priority list.

Thanks,
Lea

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