I typically keep just one copy of a book in my colleciton. However, if I get a duplicate copy of a book that I haven't seen for awhile (because it has been overdue for quite some time), I have been assigning the new book with the same accession number as the older non-returned book, assuming the other one is never coming back. I have done this with several different books, but now I am wondering if I could run into a problem if some of those older books ever do show up. Then I will have duplicate books with the same accession number, and it could be confusing. Would it be best to assign the new book with a new number until I know for sure the old book is not coming back? I would be curious to see how some of you replace a non-returned book with a new copy.
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We try to "write off" lost items about 18 months after the due date. (meaning, we delete it; but first we move its records into an Excel spreadsheet so we know what happened with that item)
If we are in contact with the borrower, we mark the item lost around 15 months.
Often, we can't contact the borrower - emails and letters are returned, phone numbers are disconnected. Then we mark the item lost about 12 months after the due date.
If we have an item that our Concourse system shows as IN and it is missing, we mark it lost after 3 months or so. If it turns up, we can just mark if Found again and rejoice like the prodigal son's Daddy.
Re: replacing lost items: We wait to replace these items for varying amounts of time, depending if they are in demand or not. Some we just don't replace, if they are older and not used much or if we have something better on the same topic.
In Concourse I am able to export a report (all items with the location "discarded") into another application like Excel.
When we decide to discard something, we change the location to Discarded and then add a comment about WHY we discarded it - low usage, poor condition, etc.
I keep a Master Discards List and just keep adding each batch to it. Then when the items are deleted, we still have a record of what we used to have and why we got rid of those.
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