How do you find things? :)
Hey everyone,
I've been gathering some info on various sites and where location information is stored for your collections. I'm seeing a little bit of everything.
I'd love to hear from you all on where you get location information for your rare books, manuscripts, off site items, etc. Are you having to look in multiple places? Is all the information electronic or is some of it physical binders (and if so, is that a small minority or half your items)?
When you receive a request in Aeon, what sort of steps do you have to go through to know where to retrieve it or how to request it from another location?
Feel free to respond to this here or email me directly at genie@atlas-sys.com. You may not want to state publically that Phil is the only one in the building who can find things and we all worry whenever Phil gets the flu. :)
Thanks!
Genie
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Genie Powell
Chief Customer Officer
Atlas Systems
Comments
Our location system has a fair amount legacy hold outs, so for some stuff, the call number is the location (besides just books.) For our collections with Boxes & Containers, most of this is currently managed in a FileMaker database. It is not a 1 to 1 correlation for Boxes to location. It tends to be in the format "Boxes 10-20 can be found in locations A through B"
We've created an Aeon add on to assist with looking location info up. It queries the FileMaker database based on the transaction's collection ID. This display's all of the location data available in the database to the staff member. If it is a box, they can use the "Import Info" button to copy the info the a Transaction field that gets printed on the call slip, otherwise, they manually enter the correct value. It saves them from (most of the time) having to open FileMaker and manually looking the info up.
Some of the legacy items that we usually need to look up in binders tend to be maps, drawings and other oversize items which are stored in flat boxes for map cases.
In the not too distant future, we will be managing our locations entirely ASpace. At that point, we intend to have some sort of process in place (via add on or other method) that will look up locations based on the ASpaceID, which will get submitted with the request.
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