Off-Site Storage from a Cataloging Point of View

Out of Sight but not Lost to View: Macquarie University Library's Stored Print Collection

“…Our discussions about the storage principles for our onsite storage mirrored in part those in the literature about findability and access of material sent offsite (see Reeves and Schmidt, 2011;Ilik, 2012). Like many libraries, our catalogue records were at varying levels of detail, in particular serial records.…”

“…Titles with catalogue records that had not been updated with changes of title were corrected as we came across them. The necessity of good serial title and holdings records for offsite, or in our case onsite, storage has been noted by Ilik (2012) and Reeves and Schmidt (2011) among others. The risk of "losing" material stored with inadequate catalogue records is "especially true for serials, since they are more likely to be associated with complex cataloguing situations and subtleties" (Ilik, 2012, 351).…”

Moving a Unique Collection to Storage: Improving Access Now and Later

“…It can be problematic and more expensive to retrieve materials from storage to retrospectively improve cataloging, and by streamlining several goals into a single project, the library made a greater impact and demonstrated good stewardship of resources. 1 Careful planning allowed librarians to combine multiple objectives and to accomplish more with less. "Rethinking workflows as projects rather than business as usual can encourage higher productivity, minimize the number of times items need to be touched, and generally create an environment that rewards accomplishment."…”

“…"Material stored without a reliable record is, for most practical purposes, lost." 8 Shlomo pointed out, "the disadvantages of storage can be somewhat ameliorated by full bibliographic description of the titles stored." 9 For this project, extensive work to ensure catalog access was essential.…”