[Koha] No edge label - Is is realistic ?

[Jean Truebridge]

Dear Michael,

This sounds terrific - however has a lot of problems in real life.
Unfortunately books are physical, not virtual.

Coming quickly to mind
	hard to read surname, first name easily from the book cover, dust jacket
etc.  Some names seem "foreign" - which is the first name.  This has to be
done by a casual, minimally trained person sometimes a teenager working
after school to return books to the shelves. Especially with 2-3 trolleys to
shelve in a given time frame.

	Also there are many in between sizes for books, so even with 3 "sizes"
there will be some wasted space.  Also how will you identify which sequence
the book will be in - fiction and nonfiction are often shelved separately.
Children's books are usually shelved separately too.  I have worked in a
library where children and adult nonfiction were shelved in the one sequence
and I am unaware of any complaints.  However, today, I don't think this
could be done in a public library - due to the legal unsuitableness of some
material for children.  How will the untrained shelver know adult, junior,
fiction, nonfiction etc etc let alone separate collections, historical -
nonbook formats too.

The easiest is a clear label with fairly short indications of the shelving
sequence- some Dewey and other numbers are excessively long for shelving.

	I agree that there is a large element of storage in libraries and that
users can cope with a fixed location point that doesn't relate to like
subjects together.  However, it is less convenient for users or browsing.

2 little cents.

Cheers

Jean Truebridge

Jean Truebridge
Information Services Officer
W.J. Tuckfield Memorial Library
jtruebridge at adavb.com.au

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PO Box 434 Toorak VIC 3142 Australia
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-----Original Message-----
From: koha-bounces at lists.katipo.co.nz
[mailto:koha-bounces at lists.katipo.co.nz]On Behalf Of Michel Virard
Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2007 5:41 AM
To: koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
Subject: [Koha] No edge label - Is is realistic ?


To old hands,

I am in the process of designing my bar-code label and I realize that a
central element is the "call number" in most libraries, i.e. the number used
to find the physical address of the book once returned to shelves. Since we
have a new (and small) library with no "manual card" heritage, we have been
looking at ways at using Koha to simplify operations and, essentially, to
eliminate the need for a call number.

In many libraries I have seen operating (Montreal municipal library is one)
each book has essentially two stickers: a small one on the edge that show a
call number (often on two or three small lines - no bar code) and another
sticker on the third cover, with one bar-code and printed lines.

The explicit purpose of the edge sticker is to permit rapid return of books
to their proper shelve by a human clerk. The shelves are then organized by
genre (French Novels, English Novels, Dictionaries, etc.) physically stored
in shelve islands.

We found that this type of organization is optimized for borrowers browsing
books on the shelves. It is the normal way to operate most libraries,
however, one has to accept that a lot of the space of the library is
organize for people moving around  and not as a simple storage area for
books. Also this type of storage is wasteful of shelve space simply because
there is no separation of books by format size, thus every shelve has to
accommodate the largest format and shelves have to be reachable by the
shorter borrowers.

Our major constraint is we are very limited in space, so we are considering
replacing physical browsing mostly by virtual browsing, since Koha allows
this type of regrouping. Also, we want to store books on shelves barely
higher than the book format they will support. There will be no other
regrouping than the sorting into three sizes. The size being self evident
will not need a marker and since we will use the combination
First-Author-Last-Name + Main-Title to do the physical sorting, we think we
can eliminate the edge sticker entirely.

Are we crazy ? Are we going to hit a brick wall ? I would appreciate any
comment, especially from old hands who have seen it all.

Michel Virard
BHQ
Montreal
Canada
mvirard at symtec.ca
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