Library inventory
Hello there!
I would love to know if anyone is conducting a regular inventory of library
materials, and if so, how. We were hoping to do an annual inventory. Our
library had never done a full inventory of the entire library before, so we
expected it to take quite a while the first time and that we'd find lots of
weird issues to fix -- which we have. 😂 But we've found the thing that
takes the very longest is scanning every single item.
Koha is our ILS and we have been using the built-in inventory report. The
short version of what we do:
Two staff members scan items throughout the year. They shelf read the area
first to make sure items are in the correct place/order, then scan the
barcodes of each item in order. They have a project cart with a laptop and
a barcode scanner. Later, we put all the barcodes into the inventory report
along with the shelving location, call number range, and date. We do update
the last seen date, but we don't check them in because they may have been
checked out after being scanned. We run the report and find any errors or
inconsistencies that need to be addressed, put the items on hold, and fix
them.
We now have over 80,000 items in our collections and they are still
growing, making the prospect of scanning every individual item each year
more and more daunting. We've started to wonder if an annual inventory is a
realistic goal, and if other libraries have more efficient methods.
I'd love to pick your brains if you're willing to share! Thank you!
Tia Haycock (she/her)
Technical Services Manager
Spanish Fork Library
https://www.facebook.com/spanishforklibrary
https://twitter.com/sf_library
https://www.instagram.com/spanishforklibrary/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC38f8LBy3uWbTyJK-RCf9Ng
801.804.4486
Hi!
I just got back from an inventory trip to our TriCounty Headquarters in
Bicknell, so this topic is kismet, kairos, all the best of timing.
In terms of Koha specifics, I found this Bywater article
https://help.bywatersolutions.com/portal/en/kb/articles/taking-inventory-in-koha#Steps_to_Generating_a_Shelf_List
that really helped. We installed the Interactive Inventory Plugin from
Github, and we thought it worked well. We appreciated the full preview of
each title upon scanning, the running list during your inventory session,
and the variety of features you can enable for inventory.
We try to inventory our bookmobile/rural headquarters once a year or every
other year, based on staffing availability. But we also have much smaller
collections than yours. We try to complete the project in a few days, like
over a weekend / when the location is already going to be closed. We
typically have a team of three or four staff members working those days,
with a lot of laughter, music, and caffeine to keep us going.
In the past, while using Polaris/Leap, we had two team members scan
together, working down the shelves, with one flagging items (using premade
bookmarks) that need further inspection (Missing items, Holds, Empty bibs,
etc.), and the other continuing to scan. With this most recent trip, we
discovered that the history list from the Koha plugin allows for the same
efficiency (and a fairly similar chance for error/missed barcodes) with
just one person scanning a shelf a time. We ran shelf reports (like the
Bywater article details) prior to the trip as well.
We are always looking for ways to improve inventory, so I'm curious to hear
how other libraries handle this. We are also still new to Koha, so we
appreciate any Koha tips and tricks, too.
Best,
Amy
On Sat, Jun 6, 2026 at 4:33 PM Tia Haycock thaycock@spanishfork.gov wrote:
Hello there!
I would love to know if anyone is conducting a regular inventory of
library materials, and if so, how. We were hoping to do an annual
inventory. Our library had never done a full inventory of the entire
library before, so we expected it to take quite a while the first time and
that we'd find lots of weird issues to fix -- which we have. 😂 But we've
found the thing that takes the very longest is scanning every single item.
Koha is our ILS and we have been using the built-in inventory report. The
short version of what we do:
Two staff members scan items throughout the year. They shelf read the area
first to make sure items are in the correct place/order, then scan the
barcodes of each item in order. They have a project cart with a laptop and
a barcode scanner. Later, we put all the barcodes into the inventory report
along with the shelving location, call number range, and date. We do update
the last seen date, but we don't check them in because they may have been
checked out after being scanned. We run the report and find any errors or
inconsistencies that need to be addressed, put the items on hold, and fix
them.
We now have over 80,000 items in our collections and they are still
growing, making the prospect of scanning every individual item each year
more and more daunting. We've started to wonder if an annual inventory is a
realistic goal, and if other libraries have more efficient methods.
I'd love to pick your brains if you're willing to share! Thank you!
Tia Haycock (she/her)
Technical Services Manager
Spanish Fork Library
https://www.facebook.com/spanishforklibrary
https://twitter.com/sf_library
https://www.instagram.com/spanishforklibrary/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC38f8LBy3uWbTyJK-RCf9Ng
801.804.4486
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Tia,
We did an inventory of all our collections in 2020 while we were closed to the public. It was the first time in years that we had done one. We did have a pretty good result from that and were able to clean up a lot of records for missing items. We did an inventory again in 2023. All 20 branches did the inventory during our open hours. We are on Polaris. We had a system similar to yours using a laptop and a scanner, but in Polaris there’s a CKI setting that is just for inventory. It adds a date to an inventory field in the item record. We would run a report when they completed an inventory of a collection (like Adult Fiction or Picture Books) and would set all the items without an inventory date to Trace. Those traced items would then be part of the regular procedure for traced materials.
Our holdings were about 1.9M items at the time. When we ran the reports at the end, there were less than 10,000 items that we ended up deleting because they weren’t found, less than 500 per branch. The loss rate was .43% (less than half of 1%) which is really good based on some of the literature we could find. Because of those results, we decided to only do an inventory of our library collections every 5 years. It just didn’t seem to be a good ROI of staff time to do it more frequently.
We do run a lot of other reports on a regular basis that staff use that I think contributed to our low loss rate. Branches do Trace reports weekly (after 3 times looking, the item is deleted). We do reports for materials that have been in delivery for a long time, those are set to Trace. We do a report for materials that have been in a being processed status for a long time. There’s also reports for unclaimed holds, unavailable and damaged items, etc. Our librarians are trained to do weeding shelf by shelf which can catch missing or misshelved items. Our staff also set items to Trace if they can’t find them when they are pulling holds.
Good luck! Feel free to reach out if you have more questions.
Stephanie Bertin, MSLS
Collection & Resource Services Manager
Salt Lake County Library | Collection & Resource Services
sbertin@slcolibrary.orgmailto:sbertin@slcolibrary.org
Phone: 801.948.7980
2197 E Fort Union Blvd., Cottonwood Heights, UT 84121
thecountylibrary.orghttps://www.slcolibrary.org/
[cid:image001.png@01DCF748.558E7E20]https://www.slcolibrary.org/
From: Tia Haycock thaycock@spanishfork.gov
Sent: Saturday, June 6, 2026 4:33 PM
To: technicalservices@lists.library.utah.gov
Subject: [Technicalservices] Library inventory
Hello there!
I would love to know if anyone is conducting a regular inventory of library materials, and if so, how. We were hoping to do an annual inventory. Our library had never done a full inventory of the entire library before, so we expected it to take quite a while the first time and that we'd find lots of weird issues to fix -- which we have. 😂 But we've found the thing that takes the very longest is scanning every single item.
Koha is our ILS and we have been using the built-in inventory report. The short version of what we do:
Two staff members scan items throughout the year. They shelf read the area first to make sure items are in the correct place/order, then scan the barcodes of each item in order. They have a project cart with a laptop and a barcode scanner. Later, we put all the barcodes into the inventory report along with the shelving location, call number range, and date. We do update the last seen date, but we don't check them in because they may have been checked out after being scanned. We run the report and find any errors or inconsistencies that need to be addressed, put the items on hold, and fix them.
We now have over 80,000 items in our collections and they are still growing, making the prospect of scanning every individual item each year more and more daunting. We've started to wonder if an annual inventory is a realistic goal, and if other libraries have more efficient methods.
I'd love to pick your brains if you're willing to share! Thank you!
[https://ci3.googleusercontent.com/mail-sig/AIorK4y7sEUvXNwrcrKcMgKX2xPmh7Z7gVMwxMn9UW4EMp1BX2rr6wkNNrXBsKWHShDuDYDyrXjUX04]
Tia Haycock (she/her)
Technical Services Manager
Spanish Fork Library
[https://ci3.googleusercontent.com/mail-sig/AIorK4zU32aGOMZrSREXK54xIm74xCssOsBZ8ejSzutVYd5UNiDyLtkZcvegywQMKHIxoN88Sv7Z8uk]https://www.facebook.com/spanishforklibrary[https://ci3.googleusercontent.com/mail-sig/AIorK4yCh0GFhlad9dvQzvltRssBaSSR6WOQCRxavVCSrV9sgI5k08zVln7KbuFoAkFqGffhNk5wE5U]https://twitter.com/sf_library[https://ci3.googleusercontent.com/mail-sig/AIorK4xuyYQsug6FSJV5GvzZUbsXVO2bFPBYLim62SDt-C-x5JzGW812Ws248VA3P69Iq5seezpO1-8]https://www.instagram.com/spanishforklibrary/[https://ci3.googleusercontent.com/mail-sig/AIorK4zZR7oIl-UdxNVoOqDXYUBSwo95_GPWRMIQM_Ga1ZtbDsRUrOcv31i_hsiQEMeqJiq5HEZAgWA]https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC38f8LBy3uWbTyJK-RCf9Ng
801.804.4486
