Creating a Custom Shelf List with BCA

by Holly Goodwin

Library Technician at SOWELA Technical Community College

Note: This article is presented as a capstone project for the Advanced System Administrator Course, which fulfills the requirements for the Advanced System Administrator Certification. Learn more about the LOUIS System Administrator Certification and capstone project here.

A few times a year library shelves should be checked to make sure books are in the proper order and not missing. A shelf list helps immensely with this task, ensuring a quick browse through to locate (or in the case of missing books, not locate) errant books.

BlueCloud Analytics offers easy to create, customizable shelf lists that you can save for perpetual use. SOWELA uses customized lists for its different libraries because we need to filter books per library since having a giant list of every material for all libraries wouldn’t be helpful for shelf reading the separate collections. For instance, when shelf reading books for the Morgan Smith library, we clearly only want Morgan Smith books on our list. By using filters, we can easily select which library we want the books to appear for.

The following instructions are how the Morgan Smith library created its customized shelf list for its small collection of books:

• Log into BCA
• Create a new, blank report

• Insert the following objects into the report:
  • Item Id
    • Mandatory for the report to work
  • Item Shelving Id
    • This is important to ensure that the books are in the proper order
  • Item Call Number
    • Shows how the call number will look on the shelf
  • Catalog Title
    • Book title
  • Item Barcode
    • Book barcode
  • Item Status
    • Book location within a library
  • Item Library Desc
    • The library that owns the book
  • Item Type Code
    • Type of book (book, reference, etc.)

Other objects may be added as needed. SOWELA also uses Item Call Number LC Range for easier sorting so that we can shelf read by topic for easier stopping points for large collections (As an example, we can print everything only in the E range of call numbers if we don’t have a lot of time that day to shelf read).

• Sort by Item Shelving Id by right clicking on it > Sort > Ascending
  • This puts the books in the correct order

• Right click on Item Type Code and select Filter on. . . Select BOOK and any other code that should be on your library’s shelves that you want included in the shelf list

• Do the same for Item Status and include anything that should be on the shelves you want the list for. SOWELA uses STACKS, STEPSBOOKS, REFERENCE, etc.
  
  
• Do the same for Item Library Desc and filter on the specific library that you need if there is more than one campus. We are using Morgan Smith since that is the library this report is for

• Save your report so you can use it again under Report Home > Save As… and select a folder
  • It will automatically update with new or removed materials, rerunning the report automatically from scratch every time you open it
    
    
• Go to Report Home > Export > Excel with plain text

The result should look something like this in excel:

• Format the excel sheet for printing
  • You can format the excel sheet as you please. We usually delete unneeded fields and only keep fields important for shelf reading such as Item Call Number, Catalog Title, and Item Barcode, but it’s all up to personal preference at this point. You can also separate pages by call number ranges if you only want to cover some sections per day

• Print your shelf list in landscape orientation so everything fits without getting cutoff

If you saved your report, then you can click one button and get a generated report each time you need an updated shelf list. Although it can take awhile to create, once created all it takes is a single click for a new and updated shelf list every time your library needs one. You can filter by library and save each report for separate libraries to make it even easier to access. These shelf lists make it easy to locate shelving errors and missing books in the stacks.