Re: reasons to automate

[Paula Galland <paula@FREENET.SCRI.FSU.EDU>]

When I read the original posting asking for reasons to automate, I
felt sure that the list would be flooded with hundreds of reasons.
When I instead noticed that the contributions lamented the automation
process, I felt that I had to jump in with the positive side of
automation.  My media center added Circulation and Catalog Plus 5 and
6 years ago respectively.

 My secretary and I (with the aid of anyone
in grabbing distance) barcoded all books and made sure each shelf list
card had an LC # as we added the barcode number strip to it. We weeded
like crazy during the process using the idea that if the item wasn't
worth at least $2.00 to the collection, we tossed it.  Our collection
of books went from 17,000 to 11,000.  We have never missed the 6000
that we discarded.

Each night I would take home the 100 or so shelf list cards that we
had found time to barcode during the day ( about an hour total) and
would type in a brief record for them on the computer that I took
home.  This took about an hour a day.  I know that this was not work
time, but when I was a classroom teacher, an hour a day of outside
work was an easy homework day.  I usually spent 2 or more hours.

Within several months our shelflist was ready to send to Follett for
retrospective conversion.  We began using the circulation part of the
program while we waited our records to come back.  These things
happened immediately:
   1. The 3 hours a week my secretary normally spent preparing overdue
notices were reduced to 10 minutes.
   2. The 1 hour a day we spent checking in books was reduced to 5
minutes.
   3. The 1 hour a day we spent locating the cards for books students
wanted to reserve and tagging them was reduced to 5 minutes.
   4. We changed our check out procedure to total self service. WE no
longer had to search our hit list to see if the student was on the
overdue list.  The computer kep track of this for us.
Students simply scanned their card (provided free by our school
picture company), scanned their books, then scanned a barcode on the
desk (a non-existant patron number with no check out priviledges) to
take their name off of the screen.  This saved huge amounts of time,
as neither of us were ever tied to the circulation desk again.

Within 6 months of the beginning of the project, we realized that we
had much more time to spend helping our students and teachers. That
helping time was more productive, as well.  We were no longer helping
them check out a book, but were helping them find and use information.

When our catalog disks arrived and were loaded into our computer the
time saving really began.  The hundreds of hours we spent each year
maintaining our card catalog were reduced to minutes.  We have trained
two secretaries at the central office to create records for AV items,
the main things we have to hand catalog, and they send the records to
us on a batch disk.  We only have to dump them in and add a barcode
number.  There has been some concern about authority on the list.
This is still a problem as it always was with cards.  However, the
keyword search function makes the problem relatively unimportant for a
small school library.  Students can learn about truncation and
combining terms and almost always succeed in finding what they want.
This was NEVER true with our card catalog.

I could go on forever about the advantages of automation but will
stop.  Let me simply state, once you complete the process you will
know that all of the headaches were worth it!
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                         paula@freenet.fsu.edu
Paula Galland - St. Simons Island, GA - Glynn County School System
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