Collection Advice & Recommendations

Each of the tools will create EBSM ‘Action Plans’. These Action Plans contain advice on what to remove from shelves, what to swap and transfer, and what to purchase in order to move actual performance figures for each of the EBSM KPIs towards the defined targets.

Typically Action Plans will list all items that meet a certain condition (for example the Grubby Item Removal Action Plan will list all items that are Grubby according to the parameter set) but crucially they will also give advice on the numbers that need to be removed to either meet target, or move toward target in a manner that doesn’t leave shelves empty.

Each Action Plan needs to contain the relevant information to enable librarians to easily and quickly locate items on shelves – minimally the author, title, collection code/Dewey Range, and ISBN should be included along with the action that needs to be carried out, and the number of items that need to be actioned.

It may be appropriate for libraries that use Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) solutions at this point to also include the barcode of the item.

The format of the Action Plans should be based on what works best for a library- for example this may be a printed list, a spreadsheet form to enable actions to be logged, or a CSV file that can be uploaded to a RFID hand held reader unit.