The folks at the Library of Congress (LOC) got a lot of heat on Capitol Hill last week. Much of it centered around the Washington Post story, Materials Missing at Library of Congress, proclaiming that 17% of the material at the LOC is missing.
Matt Raymond over at the Library of Congress blog shares with us the library’s response via an article by Gail Fineberg in the internal LOC newsletter the Gazette titled IG’s NOS Report Prompts Questions and Answers (IG = Inspector General; NOS = Not on Shelf). Excerpt is reproduced below.
The library claims that all the missing material is due simply to lack of inventory control and has nothing to do with theft or misappropriation. One can see how the Washington Post headline can easily be interpreted as a knock on the library’s security as opposed to a criticism of it’s inventory control but there remains a problem nonetheless.
I do not agree with some of the statements made by Rep. Vernon Ehlers, R-Mich and Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Calif. comparing the inventory of the LOC to the inventories and tracking capabilities of for-profit corporations like Wal-Mart, Target and UPS. This is a silly comparison and as the librarian of Congress James H. Billington reminds us “Our mandate is to provide direct public access—often on a circulating basis—to our collections, [which] distinguishes us from most museums and other cultural institutions and requires a different approach to assessing what we hold and how to protect it.”
The LOC began a comprehensive inventory of its holdings in 2002 and five years later only 20 percent of the project has been completed. One thing Rep. Ehlers did say that I agree with is “Without a completed inventory, the nation’s most prestigious library is in danger of becoming little more than a neglected storage facility, rather than a standard-setter for best practices in collections administration,”
Some 22,000 items arrive at the LOC every day and an additional 10,000 are added to the collection daily. Clearly, a state of the art inventory system is needed and deserved.
One other tidbit from the article- Did you know the Library of Congress has it’s own police force?
Previous Book Patrol post, The Black Hole at the Library of Congress
****************************************************************
IG’s NOS Report Prompts Questions and Answers
By Gail Fineberg
The Librarian of Congress and the Library’s senior managers summoned to a House Administration Committee hearing on Oct. 24 countered members’ suggestions that they take their cues from Wal-Mart, Target or UPS on how to control and track the Library’s collections inventory.
They also refuted a Washington Post headline and story, published the morning of the hearing, which said 17 percent of the Library’s general collections is “missing.” The story was based on Inspector General Karl W. Schornagel’s March 2007 audit survey report, “Survey of Collections Access, Loan, and Management Division Service,” which was also a subject of the congressional hearing. Schornagel is authorized by statute to operate independently of the Library and to report directly to Congress.
Nowhere in his survey report does Schornagel suggest that 17 percent of the Library’s general collections is “missing” or unaccounted for. The 17 percent represents a not-on-shelf (NOS) rate for a population of 244,288 initial requests for items from the general collections during FY 2006. Of these requests, Schornagel estimated that 83 percent were filled on the first try and 4.3 percent of the items requested were found with subsequent searches. Schornagel said the collections management division believes “quality assurance” searchers could not locate 12.7 percent of the items requested because of “bibliographic errors and lack of inventory control.”
The inspector general gave several examples of errors and tracking problems, including the misshelving of items; the removal of items for conversion to other formats, such as digitization, without a corresponding change to the item’s inventory record; and item records that are illegible or incomplete.
Schornagel commended numerous efforts of the Collections Access, Loan and Management Division (CALM) to improve item retrieval service, and he recommended greater use of the Integrated Library System to automate the public’s item-retrieval requests and to generate and monitor performance statistics.
In his opening statement, Rep. Vernon Ehlers, R-Mich., the ranking minority member on the committee, said: “The Library’s own inspector general has found that at least 17 percent of the Library’s general collection cannot be located. When nearly two out of ten items in the Library’s most often used collection are unaccounted for, we must demand answers as to where these items are, and why they have not been captured in the Library’s efforts to catalog its items.”
He added, “You might be well advised to consult with Wal-Mart or Target who track inventory every day,” an idea that Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Calif., later endorsed. “If UPS can track millions of items a day and not have a 10 percent loss, why can’t you?” Lungren asked.
Librarian of Congress James H. Billington and Associate Librarian for Library Services Deanna Marcum responded. “We are a working library—not a storehouse of information to be locked down,” the Librarian said in his opening statement.
“Our mandate is to provide direct public access—often on a circulating basis—to our collections, [which] distinguishes us from most museums and other cultural institutions and requires a different approach to assessing what we hold and how to protect it,” he said.
Testified Marcum: “The Library of Congress is not like a commercial warehouse that can close for a few days to take inventory,” she said. “New materials come to us constantly [some 22,000 items arrive at the Library each day, and some 10,000 are added to the collections each day]. Therefore, controlling our inventory is not simply a project we can complete someday but is a continuous core activity.”
In his oral testimony, Schornagel said: “It is important to recognize that, unlike Wal-Mart, which was designed from the ground up with inventory control in mind, the Library—as all libraries—was designed with access to the collections as its primary purpose. The systems that the Library had used since its inception are designed to create cataloging, not inventory records.”
Billington and Marcum also took issue with the insinuations of the Post report. The Librarian emphasized that the Library’s security office and the inspector general regularly inspect and review the collections and “have found no significant deficiencies in our safeguards.”
“We have had no known instances of theft from the collections since the 1990s, when I implemented our expanded collections-security protocols, and our Library of Congress security program has been viewed as a model for some time now by national and international cultural institutions,” Billington said.
“Today’s article did not correctly interpret the IG’s audit report,” Marcum said. “The headline’s misleading reference to 17 percent is not a number reflecting books that are ‘missing.’ As the IG report states, once we have identified that a book is not where we expect it to be, the more intensive search results in finding the item in all but about [12] percent of the time. This ‘not-on-shelf’ rate has been cut in half over the past few years.”
Marcum noted that the Post had failed to mention the inspector general’s conclusion, which he also stated in an executive summary of his report about the survey to determine if the Collections Access, Loan, and Management Division (CALM) “efficiently and effectively responds to requests to retrieve collection items.”
Schornagel concluded: “We did not become aware of any material weaknesses in CALM’s operations during our survey and concluded that further audit work on this project is not necessary at this time. Our survey assessment indicated that CALM is providing timely and accurate retrieval service, especially considering the volume of material it handles and the size of the Library’s general collections.”
Although initial item-retrieval requests generated not-on-shelf reports in 17 percent of the requests, “most of these instances did not appear to be attributable to process or internal control failures,” the inspector general said.
The inspector general noted that CALM is taking several actions to address its goals and objectives and to improve its service. These actions include transferring the shelving function to contractors to allow deck attendants time to focus on retrieving items; improving quality-assurance procedures to initiate quicker follow-up searches in response to not-on-shelf reports; shifting second copies and infrequently requested items to off-site storage modules to reduce shelf overcrowding on Capitol Hill; and engaging in a Baseline Inventory Program (BIP) to ensure item records are accurate, legible and in agreement with the Library’s automated Integrated Library System (ILS).
Tracking Inventory
Ehlers said “another area of concern is the failure of administrators to complete a comprehensive inventory of the Library’s items. The baseline inventory project started in 2002, and five years later, only 20 percent of the project has been completed. This is particularly troublesome given the pending merger between the Library of Congress Police and the Capitol Police.”
Ehlers said a complete inventory of all the Library’s assets is essential to measure the impact of changes resulting from the merger. The House Administration Committee soon will consider pending legislation that would effect the merger.
“Without a completed inventory, the nation’s most prestigious library is in danger of becoming little more than a neglected storage facility, rather than a standard-setter for best practices in collections administration,” Ehlers said.
Billington emphasized that bibliographic and inventory controls are but one facet of a strategic security plan developed in the 1990s to secure and preserve the collections. “Protecting the collections requires a policing function, bibliographic and inventory controls and state-of-the-art preservation treatment,” he said.
The Integrated Library System (ILS), which made its debut in 2000, gave the Library the capability of item-level control for the first time in its history. A database is being populated with inventory data that is added to cataloging data.
Concurrent with implementation of the ILS was the design and creation of the Baseline Inventory Program, which was to provide a sequential inventory of the 17 million books, journals and serials in the general collection. “We estimated in 1998 that the BIP might be completed in eight years at an annual cost of $1.1 million,” the Librarian said in his written testimony. “However, these goals for this never-before attempted project proved far more ambitious than originally foreseen. We have to date surveyed approximately 2.9 million items under the BIP, and we estimate it could take 10 more years to complete with available funds.”
In addition to those 2.9 million inventoried items, Marcum said, each of the nearly 2 million volumes moved to off-site storage at Ft. Meade can be tracked with bar codes and inventory records. Staff report a 100 percent retrieval rate for every item requested from Ft. Meade.
Marcum said the baseline inventory program will be enhanced by such “use-driven” inventory controls applied to collections as they are moved and to special collections, such as the roughly 6 million audiovisual items that were moved to the Packard Campus in Culpeper, Va.
“Our current inventory efforts have no precedent in the world library community for a collection of this size,” Billington said. “I am not aware of any other major research library or similar cultural institution that has even attempted to inventory its collections on this scale because of the inherent difficulties and costs.”
Schornagel testified that although progress on the BIP has been slow, “I do not believe that this has significantly impaired the Library’s ability to secure its collections.”
He said he based that opinion on the Library’s comprehensive collections security program, which includes the work of the Collections Security Oversight Committee and on collections reviews his office has conducted in January 1999, December 2000, October 2001, October 2004 and March 2006. “No significant issues have emerged as a result of those reviews. Therefore, on the whole, I believe that the current collections security controls are functioning effectively,” he said.
***************************************************************