The Pitts staff and student workers are well-versed in magic, but magic isn’t how we find books when they go missing from the stacks.
When a patron cannot find a book where the online catalog says it should be, the Pitts staff and student workers undertake four official searches, spaced across varying time intervals – one, seven, twenty-eight, and fifty-six days – to find the missing book. Over time, we have learned the most common reasons a book ends up somewhere it shouldn’t be, and we use that knowledge to search efficiently. Often an item is missing due to its being misshelved in the wrong place. Someone may have stashed away material for their work, or someone may have misread a call number when putting a book back. We assume the latter when first searching the stacks, and we try to reconstruct the error in a logical way. For example, errors in shelving might result from swapping an s for a 5, reading HC as HG or HQ, dropping numbers from long sequences of numbers in the case of BS1575.568, or some other understandable mistake. So, for example, if we can’t find a book with a call number HM851 .B3645, we may start our search in the HN851 section.
To maintain shelving accuracy and catch misplaced books before our patrons do, our circulation student workers are perpetually checking the order of the material on the shelves, and they are regularly reviewing the shelving done by their peers. As a library patron, you can help too! Please support our efforts to keep books where they belong by putting items you remove from the shelves on a reshelving cart, which are spread throughout the library, rather than returning it to the shelf. It’s always possible that the book may not belong in the gap you found. By leaving the books on the reshelving carts you provide staff with material to hone our shelving skills, and you also provide us with accurate data on the use of our materials. So even though you may want to help us out by reshelving the books, you actually help us more by placing them on the reshelving carts and letting the Pitts experts take it from there!
By Yasmine Green, Collection Management Coordinator
