New Look Library Book Processing

I am pleased to announce that the new book processing standard for UCL Library Services is ready to go live.

This standard will give us consistent content and branding. It will help us to improve customer service. It will also simplify book processing, making it quicker and cheaper for books to reach the shelf.

The main change will be to reduce the number of proprietary stampings to one per book. We will also remove the various colour coding labels and stickers. Instead, we will have a single sticker on the spine to show the loan status in words.

Data labels will replace date labels. They will show the name, address and contact details of our libraries.

This is in line with the new national standard for academic library book processing.

The standard will go live the beginning of July. There will be a rolling implementation.

The first phase will be via shelf ready processing by our vendor, Coutts-Proquest. Some items will continue to arrive from Dawsons, under the old specification. We will be distributing processing materials to sites and processing teams. Local teams can then begin to use the new specification.

The Acquisitions team will be able to provide templates and materials.  We will be in touch with teams that process materials locally.

We will not be seeking to relabel the material already on the shelves.

I have placed the instructions for this standard on Libnet at:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/libnet/procedures/collections/purchase-books

The document is called “Standard book Processing Specification” under the toolkit section.

You can contact me at bill.martin@ucl.ac.uk.