WWCC DFW - Week 5

I spent several hours testing my inventory process. I printed out three shelves worth of call numbers from my Excel report and began checking the list against the media collection. Noticing that the CD collection was shelved separately, I had resorted my report to group the CDs onto a separate list. I soon discovered that not ALL CDs are separate. Soon I came across a call number that was not on my list. It turned out to be an audio book. I asked Chris about it and he informed me that the audio book CDs are shelved with the main media collection and only the music CDs are separate. Soooo, I resorted my report again, and went back to my three shelves. Soon I came across several DVDs that were on the shelf but not in my report. A closer look at my report revealed that they were in my report, but the numbers were sorted incorrectly.

In order to solve the sort problems associated with the inconsistent use of decimals and spacing when the numbers are entered into the data field, I parsed out decimals and spaces and then sorted the column as a text data. This in turn caused some call numbers (though fewer than when sorting them unparsed) to sort incorrectly. Unfortunately, this is a shortcoming I am going to have to live with. Nevertheless, I think I finally have the report set up the way I need it, and I’m ready to do the inventory for real.

As I continue to gain hands-on experience, I have been pleased to discover that my skills from my previous work experience are quite transferable to the library setting. My database management and report writing experience have definitely come in handy on this Media Inventory project.