Issue 6

I read with interest Angie Barillaro's article on her experience in using ASCISRECON to automate her library stock. Like Angie, we too had manually entered all data from our fiction self-lists on to the Ocelot system, and were now faced with a very large non-fiction stock. ASCISRECON to the rescue! However, we approached the task from a different angle to Angie.

Our book stock had been catalogued by a number of different librarians over the years and consequently some of the books were entered under "unusual" call numbers. Although aware of the negative feedback from some librarians over ASCIS' own discrepancies in their use of Dewey numbers, for the sake of consistency, both now and in the future, we decided to make our non-fiction books consistent with the call numbers used by ASCIS, while taking advantage of the ASCISRECON option of including our own call numbers for any areas we catalogue differently (for example, biographies).

Like Angie, we drew books from the shelves a few at a time, but we also used this opportunity to weed stock, barcode the books and check for general repairs. The book was then researched on the ASCIS micro-fiche, and a written record made of the ASCIS order number, the barcode we had attached to the book, plus any extra information we wished to appear on the data, such as subject headings, location, and so on. These records are then entered into the ASCISRECON computer order at a later date. Any change to the Dewey number was made on both the book and the catalogue cards before the book was returned to the library shelves. By using this process we found we only had to handle both book and data once.

As we are still working on our large book stock, we cannot make any conclusions as to the final result of using ASCISRECON. However, if the ease and success rate we have found so far continues, ASCISRECON will certainly have made a seemingly impossible task possible.