Running an inventory

An inventory session compares what your catalog claims you own against what is physically on the shelves. In most libraries this is an annual ordeal with a printout and a pencil. In Bookleaf it is a scan and a report.

Before you start

Take a backup. An inventory touches a lot of records, and a backup makes the whole exercise reversible. See Backups.

Do it when the library is quiet. Books moving in and out during a count produce discrepancies that are not real. A term break, or a closed day, is worth arranging.

Have your scanner ready. A USB barcode scanner is dramatically faster than a phone camera for this — it behaves like a keyboard, and you can scan a shelf without touching anything.

Doing the count

1. Start an inventory session from the Inventory screen.
2. Walk the shelves and scan every copy. Order does not matter; you do not have to follow call number sequence.
3. Bookleaf records each scan against the session as you go.
4. Close the session when you have covered the collection.

Work shelf by shelf and finish the shelf you are on before stopping. The most common source of false “missing” results is a section that was half-counted when someone was interrupted.

Scanning the same copy twice is harmless — it is recorded as seen, once.

Reading the results

When the session closes, you get:

Seen — copies scanned and present. No action.

Missing — copies the catalog says you own that were never scanned. Investigate before doing anything: a book on a display table, on a trolley, in the librarian’s office or in a repair pile is not missing, it is elsewhere.

Unexpected — copies scanned that the catalog did not expect on that shelf, including items marked lost that have turned up. Genuinely satisfying, and more common than you would think.

Dealing with what is missing

Resist marking everything missing as lost on the day the count finishes. A realistic process:

1. Search the obvious places — repair pile, office, trolleys, display, staff desks.
2. Check whether it is checked out. A copy out on loan is not on the shelf and should not have been scanned. Bookleaf accounts for this, but a manual reconciliation of your own is worth doing the first time you run a count.
3. Wait a term. Books come back. Marking a copy lost immediately means undoing it later.
4. Then mark the remainder lost. A copy marked lost stops being offered for loan while the title and its borrowing history stay intact.

What the count tells you beyond the missing list

Two things worth looking at while you have the data:

Where losses concentrate. If one subject area is losing far more than others, that is usually a shelving or supervision problem rather than bad luck, and it is actionable.

What has not circulated at all. Combined with the circulation report, an inventory shows you the shelf space occupied by books nobody has borrowed in years. That is the evidence a weeding decision needs, and the argument for a different acquisition budget next year.

How often

Once a year is standard, usually at the end of the school year.

A large collection can be done in sections instead — one subject area per month, rotating through the year. That spreads the work and means no single week is consumed by counting.