Bibliographic Services — McMaster University Libraries

Pre-Processed Books July 17, 2007

So, where to begin?

After working with our vendors over the course of several months, our first shipment of pre-processed books should arrive in the next week or so. We’ve established profiles with our two major vendors to apply barcodes, spine labels, property labels, and tattle-tape to the books we order from them. We’re all waiting to see how they stack up to the ones we’ve been doing in-house and what the hit rate will be.

The process took longer than expected when we hit a snag with the profiling. Originally, we based this on our acquisitions fund codes, using them to ensure the right spine label prefix was applied. Unfortunately, none of us realized at the time that Horizon doesn’t include the fund code when it sends our orders electronically to the vendors. So, back to the drawing board we went. The spine labels are now based on collection code, which does actually make it through the EDI process. This may in the end prove to be more accurate, since some topics split between libraries (psychology, for example). We can generally make such divisions by LC class, but this is a very neat and tidy way to send the books to the right library at the point of order.