Speaking of lost items (see damaged items for more info), I've been doing a few quick calculations today on the lost item issue.
Over the past year there has been 3000-3500 items lost at any one time. Feb this year the number has topped 4000. 2000 of these items are from 2008 alone.
This means that every month in 2008 167 items were borrowed and never returned.
At an average of $20 each that means we are losing $3340 worth of stock each month.
What happens if these rates continue?
Over the past six months we have spent approx $30 000 on between 2000-2500 items each month. If the trend continues, 10% of our spending will be gone by the end of next month. The equivalent of 6% of our incoming stock will be lost.
I just wanted to bring this to your attention to think about for the next meeting. Perhaps we can come up with a plan for decreasing these numbers.
Heather
2 comments:
Hi
has there been any research to see what similar sized libraries are spending/losing?
I'm not saying that the levels of loss are acceptable or should be ignored, just that it would be interesting to see what's happenng in other services
Cheers
Kristen
I've done some searches for articles or reports on the issues, but haven't come up with much. I'll see if I can start asking around...
What I've found from our own collection however is that top three lost collections are ANF, AF and picture books.
I've been assessing the ANF records and checking which parts of the collection have the most items missing from them.
They are (in no particular order):
*Self help (pregnancy, job interviews etc)
*Animal care
*Art and design- drawing/painting/design
*DIY
*Health
*True Crime
Apart from true crime, you could say that all these types of books are such that people would want to refer back to and would probably be better to own. They regard ongoing projects or issues.
I'm wondering what protective steps we can take regarding these collections.
Could we perhaps encourage more photocopying within the library (disregarding the environment)? Make more of these books not for loan?
Could we create more information packages to refer to such as the school project packs we have been creating?
Have more links to websites or databases from the library site?
The big question I suppose is do we want to start discouraging people from borrowing certain parts of the collection and using more resources within the library? If we took any of these steps we'd be skewing our stats etc.
What do people think?
Heather
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