Supplementing the Bookmobile Collection

 Submitted by Sarah Reynolds

It is hard to believe Loanie has already been on the road for five months! The Outreach Team has had a blast, learning something new every day. One of our biggest challenges is making sure we have items available at each stop that meet the needs of the patrons at that location. While we have an amazing core collection for casual browsers, we are finding that many of our users want specific authors and genres that we need to pull from the branches. How we track and maintain records for these items is a work in progress, but we wanted to share the basics in case any questions emerge.

When we pull items from the branches, we place them in a record set entitled “Bookmobile”, hide them in PAC and make them non-holdable. When we pull items from the bookmobile and return them to the home library, we do the same process in reverse - make them holdable, visible in PAC, remove them from the record set, and route them to the branches.

It gets a bit tricky once an item checks out. Initially, if the patron returned the items to the branch, Outreach had no way of knowing the items had come back so the materials will still be hidden in PAC and non-holdable even though they were sitting on the shelf. After troubleshooting different scenarios, we have come up with a way to (hopefully) keep this from happening. Outreach will review the record set each time we go out and change the status of any items that were checked out that day back to holdable and visible in PAC and remove them from the record set. This will ensure that materials that were checked out on the bookmobile but returned at a branch will be routed to their proper location or patron and be discoverable and holdable.

If items belonging to the branches are returned to the Bookmobile, we will determine whether we will  house the item on the Bookmobile temporarily or route it back to the branch immediately. If it is kept on the Bookmobile, we will add it back to the record set, hide it in PAC, and make it non-holdable. If routed back to the branch, we will just check it in and return it to the branch.

We are also working with IT to see if we can generate a report that will allow us to catch any items that may have slipped through the cracks. Please let us know if you have any issues arise as a result of this procedure.