Inventory Team Checks Out Library

A special squad of five librarians showed up for work at the Fountain Valley branch library Monday morning to help the regular staff with a daunting task: counting and sorting 90,000 books, video and audio cassettes, and getting the job done fast.

Using portable computer terminals and scanning wands, the librarians went to work shelf by shelf as part of the Orange County Public Library system’s first comprehensive inventory in more than a decade.

“We scan each and every book at each and every library,” said Maureen Gebelein, automated services manager with the Orange County Public Library.

“Everything should be a clean slate when we’re done,” said Gebelein, who is overseeing the computerized inventory program.

The goal is to identify the books in every branch, get books to their proper places and find those that have been lost. The massive inventory program began in the small Villa Park branch last year and will conclude in Rancho Santa Margarita later this year.

Fountain Valley is the 25th of the system’s 27 branches to have its collection inventoried, County Librarian John M. Adams said. When the job is completed countywide, a total of 2.4 million volumes will have been scanned.

Preliminary figures indicate a book loss rate of about 5%, Adams said. A follow-up program in about two years will verify the count.

Books are removed from shelves, scanned and either set in a “problem stack” or returned to their places. To keep the job from becoming tedious, the librarians say, they devise ways to keep it interesting--making up names for the various patterns used to scan books into the mainframe computer, for example.

The librarians say they also have favorite and most dreaded areas of the library. Large, heavy art books are universally unpopular because they are hard to handle, while the small paperbacks are favored for their external bar codes, which means they can be scanned right on the shelf.

Before computerized systems became available, Adams said, complete and accurate inventories were “almost undoable.”

Even with the high-tech help, they are so time-consuming that they are not conducted very often, said Pat Earnest, technical services manager for the five-branch Anaheim Public Library.

“It’s like cleaning out your closet,” she said. “You don’t do it if you don’t have to.”