Available

In my local library last week, I found myself within a whisker of saying rather peevishly, “Well, it says on the catalogue that it’s available!” I caught myself in time, remembering that there are very many reasons why something which says that it is “available” may well not be.

It may have been stolen, recently or many years ago, depending on when the last stock check was done (and heaven knows, most libraries don’t have the resources to do stock checks at all nowadays).

 

It may never have been in stock at all, appearing on the catalogue only because of a mis-match between item and ISBN, whether that happened during so-called (forgive my cynicism) “shelf-ready supply” or during a retrospective conversion exercise decades ago.

Or it may have been withdrawn, but no record made to update the catalogue.

 

It may have been mis-shelved accidentally - or deliberately, by someone who wanted to be sure that they were the only person who could find it again. Libraries without time to do shelf-checks often don't have time to do shelf-tidying either.

 

It may have had its spine label changed by someone unaware or uncaring of any connection between the spine-label and the shelfmark given on the catalogue. Don’t tell me this doesn’t happen because I know it does.

Or it may be in a pile in a workroom, waiting to be re-shelved, or re-processed, or for any one of a multitude of reasons.

Or, and this is my pet hate, it may have been taken for display or to be put on quick-choice shelves, making it impossible for anyone to find who is actually looking for it. 

So, all that we mean when we say on the catalogue that something is available, is that we don’t know for sure that it is unavailable – and this isn’t the same thing at all. "Available" actually translates as, "It may or may not be in stock and even if it is in stock neither you nor we may be able to find it".

Why do we go on using the word “available”? Perhaps we should put pressure on our OPAC suppliers to come up with something better. If we feel we have to say anything at all, it would be more accurate to say, “maybe”. Or, does anyone know if there is an emoticon for a Gallic shrug? That is pretty much what library staff do when someone says, “But it says on the catalogue that it’s available!”

It's big and blue

When I was a cataloguer, it would never have surprised me if the reader services staff had said not to bother with the physical description part of the record. It always seemed a bit of a faff, counting pages and wielding the ruler. It was the sort of pedantic fiddle-faddling that gave cataloguers a bad name. Now that I have jumped over the fence and turned from gamekeeper to poacher, I realise just how useful that physical description is. 

I doubt that there are any libraries where everything is exactly where it should be, with every book in its place, but even if there are, I am not working in one. And when you are looking for something that isn’t in its right place, it is very useful to know what sort of a thing it is that you’re looking for, especially when you have got someone waiting who very much wants to read that book and to read it right now, and is getting quite impatient that you can’t find it. 

The date is a bit of a clue – a book published in 1937, or 1957, isn’t going to look like a book published in 2013. But what is really useful is knowing how thick it is likely to be, roughly how many pages it has – am I looking for a great fat tome or a flimsy pamphlet?  And if you notice that it is 38cm high, well then, it just might be worth looking on that shelf where the tall books go to lie down. 

Wouldn’t it be great if instead of a cover image, we included an image of the spine? After all, that’s what we are looking at, most of the time. The ultimate help would be for the bib record to tell me what colour the book is, but I guess not even RDA is going to do that. In the meantime, all you cataloguers out there, please remember those of us who are looking for needles in haystacks and keep on including the 300 field.