What if your recent purchases arrived cataloged and neatly labeled, ready to hit the shelves?
Backstage refers to this scenario as ‘shelf ready processing’, and it’s a phrase we use in a number of situations. Perhaps your library has just been gifted a book collection, and it needs to be made available quickly for an upcoming celebration. Or maybe you have a backlog of published theses that need to be accessible in the catalog and neatly housed, barcoded, and shipped to offsite storage.
Most typically, our shelf ready processing workflow is utilized in conjunction with ongoing publisher orders. For large libraries, it can help manage the flood of materials that are needed by various departments, as with Universities. For small libraries, it can free up a little bit of time to focus on other acquisitions or temporarily return some bandwidth for a big project happening onsite.
Step By Step
The process, on the whole, is much simpler than one might expect. As a first step, we gather your MARC and physical processing specifications. Once we have the details hammered out, you can arrange to have your publisher send materials directly to our offices.
When a box arrives, we arrange the books for each invoice onto a designated section of our material storage shelves. If there are issues, such as misprints or missing items, your Backstage Project Manager is able to contact the publisher directly to sort out replacements. The materials with individual invoices are “checked out” all together by a member of the cataloging staff and, once the bibliographic records are ready to go, the invoices are marked for physical processing.
From there, the invoices are packed up – a single box to a single invoice – and sent on to the library. MARC records can be delivered by email or sent through an FTP for your ILS to ingest automatically at the backend.
So, in short, the library’s interaction would be:
- Collaborate with your assigned Project Manager to outline your institution’s MARC and physical processing guidelines.
- Instruct your publisher to send invoices and orders directly to our office.
- Manage your firm, approval, and standing orders with the publisher.
- Receive processed acquisitions from Backstage, ready to be shelved and marked as available in your ILS.
The Recipe for Success
The ease of the system is made possible by having flexible processing options and focusing on the initial profiling, whereby your Backstage Project Manager makes certain that the transition of work will be smooth. What are some of the things that we look at?
Formats and Languages
While monographs and sets are the most common materials that we receive from publishers, we have also worked with music score acquisitions wherein each music part requires unique processing. Our network of catalogers allows us to work with over 100 languages, including many utilizing non-Roman alphabets.
MARC: Unedited, Copy, and Original Cataloging
The depth of processing in the bibliographic record often depends on the immediate goals of the library. In discussing her experiences with shelf ready workflows, Project Manager Kelli Moyer was able to describe many unique preferences across different libraries:
- Search for a copy record and only update the subject headings.
- Fully enhance every record according to the library’s catalog specifications.
- Search for and edit copy records, but flag books that need original cataloging; these are set aside to be completed by the library’s cataloging team instead.
- Include shelf listing, but only within each invoice.
- Include shelf listing, but across the entire catalog.
With options for taking unedited copy, enhancing copy, and/or generating original records, the process can be fully customized to suit your preferences. While some libraries prefer to offload the entirety of processing, others favor handling a section of it themselves – and both options are excellent if they fit institutional needs.
Holdings Field
As long as there is a clear way of collecting the information in a holdings field, this is another aspect of the process that the Backstage team can handle. Do you need different subfields if it’s an approval order versus a firm order? Not a problem. Are art books going to one location and political science to another? In addition to coordinating different location codes in the MARC record, we’re also able to ship materials to multiple locations.
“For one project,” explains Kelli Moyer, “we are sending some materials to a main library and the remainder to offsite storage. As long as the guidelines are set up at the start of the project, it’s easy to do.”
Physical Processing
With some exceptions, it’s best for the library to send Backstage the supplies they’d like our team to use over the course of their project. It’s more cost effective for the institution, and it ensures we’re using identical supplies to that which is already in circulation at your library.
As part of project profiling, we’ll discuss what needs to be done – barcodes, book covers, spine labels, etc. – to what materials, and in which locations.
Additional Notes
Handing off a major portion of processing to a third party can be intimidating. We typically arrange for a sample period when starting a project; this involves receiving a few invoices, trialing the specifications, and sending these to the library for review. Quality assurance continues throughout the length of the project as our standard workflow ensures 10% of all materials are reviewed thoroughly to measure error rates and ensure the project is proceeding smoothly. In addition to this, Backstage offers a lifetime guarantee.
We already coordinate shelf ready processing for a number of vendors across the world. If you’re interested in simplifying your acquisition process and would like to start a conversation with your publisher on how to make it happen, call us at 1.800.288.1265 or send an email to info@bslw.com.
