In 2006, the decision was taken to review UEA’s acquisition and cataloguing processes as it was felt that a move to shelf ready acquisition increasingly being offered by book suppliers would bring greater value to our community. Superficially this may seem a straight forward thing to do, but for UEA, like so many other HEIs, we used a homemade version of Library of Congress, not the standard version. As we wanted to get as much value from shelf ready as we could, including the provision of catalogue records, subject headings and call numbers, we realised that the biggest obstacle to going shelf ready would be our classification scheme. Without doubt, over the years these adaptations had brought value, but over time the schedules had become overly complicated and in addition there was the loss of continuity as staff retired, taking their knowledge of their schemes with them. In addition, the role of a Faculty Librarian had changed. By 2006 we were in a position of needing a senior librarian to classify a book before it was catalogued. We just didn’t have the resources to do this and it was inevitably delaying the time it took to get books on the shelves.
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