Yes, it IS a popularity contest!


I'm weeding our videocassette collection and I was looking for worthwhile criteria to use. First I thought I'd do it by looking at inactivity, but making the cut-off 1 year of inactivity only isolated about 50 titles out of 2500. Then I decided to look at the ratio of months on shelf to number of checkouts, and that gave me something to work with.

Our consortium has a "reports generator" which roughly allows us to do an SQL query on the database, then export the results to Excel. It's a web-based thing, that doesn't let us choose from all the available fields that the database has, so I wasn't able to use it to grab the data I needed. Specifically, I was looking for the item add dates.

So, I had one of the sys admins at the consortium run a report for me of all our feature film videocassettes, with the following fields:

call number
title
creation date
# of CKOs
last circ date
bib #
barcode

I had to do some string manipulation to the creation date, because it was given to me as a text field, and I wanted to calculate how many months the item had been on shelf, but I ended up looking at the following calculation:

(# of CKOs / months on shelf) * 1000

It turns out I had another issue, since close to half of our collection already existed before we moved to Horizon, so all those had the same creation date, but omitting those from the set, allowed me to see what was average circulation over time.

For my library, the average circulation for feature films on videocassette is 1.264. I'm multiplying that by 1000, just because it looks cool, but the bottom line is, the average videocassette circs one and a quarter times a month. Now I have something to gauge my weeding on. Now I just have to figure out how many I want to get rid of. I intend to look at the stats for other types in our collection, and I'll post what I find.

Posted: Fri - March 23, 2007 at 01:39 PM      

©