Inventory

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Inventory in Evergreen

Evergreen has a native, built-in functionality for performing inventories. It’s a simple, no frills process that’s as simple as changing the check-in modifier in your check-in screen. Georgia PINES has some excellent documentation on how inventory works; SELCO suggests using the workflow they have labelled "Inventory Process Using the Check-in Modifier Interface" as this will be the most useful in catching immediate problems in the inventory: items that belong to another library, items marked missing/lost/discard, etc.

In the check-in screen, click the box labeled Checkin Modifiers and check the box next to Update Inventory. Once you’ve activated the Update Inventory modifier, you’ll see a red bar across the top of your screen indicating you’re in inventory mode.

Once that’s active, you are good to start scanning items. 

• Much like Horizon, inventory in Evergreen won't catch shelf-reading errors or automatically flag an incorrect shelving location, so there will need to be a separate workflow to do that if so desired. SELCO recommends adding some columns to your check-in display if you haven't already, such as call number, status, location, circulation library. Having the location column displayed will help you check for items that are in the wrong shelving location.

• Because of the simplicity of the inventory process in Evergreen, it lends itself more to an 'as you go' workflow than a big push. With this in mind, it’s perhaps easier to pick a collection at a time, or even a section of a collection at a time and perform inventory at a steady pace. 

• Evergreen's method lets you deal with common inventory errors as you scan rather than relying on reports after all the scanning. Because the inventory process happens in the check-in module, items belonging to other libraries will be transited when scanned, and any missing/lost/damaged items can be dealt with at the point of scan as well. With that in mind, you’ll want to have a plan and a workflow of how to deal with those exceptions as they come up before you start scanning.

After finishing up with scanning, you will need a report to help you find any items that didn't get an inventory date added to them. If writing your own report, some suggestions for inclusion in that report are title, call number, shelving location, and status. Any report should get you a good list that you can first shelf-check for, and then create a bucket from so you can do what you'd like to do to them in bulk. There is an excellent example from Chris Amorosi at NOBLE of a report he built and used in Simple Reports to report on inventories - check slides 15-21 to see his process and how to build and manipulate the report.

A few of your colleagues have already completed/are working on inventories in the region, so reaching out to them on dir_pub or via the Evergreen listserv would be encouraged.

A note on inventory laptops

With the move to Evergreen, SELCO has decided not to keep the inventory laptops loanable to libraries for a few different reasons.

-The main function of the inventory laptops was to provide an extra Citrix seat and Horizon login for folks doing inventory as you couldn't be logged in multiple places. With Evergreen you can be logged in multiple places. We've also done away with generic logins for security reasons, which these were. Setting up both a workstation and a named Evergreen login for each inventory a library does would prove complicated. 

-The SELCO laptops are at least 7-8 years old and are starting to not hold a charge well and have some functionality issues, which makes them less reliable and/or portable, which is a main selling point for inventory.

-There is a fair bit of overhead for SELCO staff to set everything up ahead of time: set up inventory logins, check and charge the laptops when they went out, maintain a calendar/record for booking, hunt them down, maintain/replace equipment, etc. The person who was doing that has since left SELCO and none of our current positions have the capacity to absorb that in the region.