2.2. If You Need To Rebarcode Your Collection

Last Updated 05/17/2023

Rebarcoding Your Collection

Not everyone needs to rebarcode their collection, but if your barcode range overlaps with another library in the system, or has a small number of digits, then you may need to rebarcode your collection before joining Cardinal.

Below is some advice from Rishara Finsel, the Library Director at Transylvania County Public Library from the time she went through a rebarcoding project while at Polk County.

Rebarcoding is a big project; there's no sugarcoating that. We rebarcoded slightly more than 50,000 items and it took us a year and a day.

Time: We use RFID, so we also had to reprogram those tags, and we also switched to RFID stingray tags on discs while we were at it. This made our process a lot more involved than a simple barcode replacement. We estimate that it took about 45-50 seconds per item, on average, to rebarcode and reprogram RFID tags. I'm guessing that about 30 seconds per item is a generous estimate for just rebarcoding, though it will depend on your ILS and set-up. We didn't have a time crunch, so generally treated it as a side project, which is why it took a year. It certainly could have been done in a shorter timeframe, but the overall staff hours needed wouldn't change much, regardless of whether those staff hours are spread out or scheduled for a shorter deadline.

Process: We made a master map of the collection, and my tech services librarian used that to track progress and direct people where to work. We usually had two different collection areas being worked at any given time, with different people working on each. We made a mobile station with a laptop, barcode scanner, and stack of barcodes that we took to the stacks to rebarcode most of the books. In some cases, with media and with smaller collections, we filled a cart with items and took them to a staff workstation and rebarcoded there; that usually only happened at our smaller branch (which wasn't big enough to make a mobile station worthwhile) or when the mobile station was in use elsewhere. Working in the stacks was generally more efficient.

Who: We had a variety of staff working on rebarcoding, as well as three very trusted long-term volunteers. My tech services librarian kept a loose schedule of when people were working on it. Essentially though, if you had free time, and the mobile station was available, you grabbed it and just picked up where the last person left off.

Advice and lessons learned:

Weed your collections first! And then weed them again!
Celebrate your progress, otherwise it just becomes ongoing drudgery. We made a rocketship progress marker on the wall in our staff area that I updated every week. Every time we finished another 5,000 items we had some sort of celebration, which included the volunteers and all staff (since those who weren't rebarcoding were covering for those who were.) They weren't necessarily big: ice cream, tote bags, SRP shirts. My favorite one was puppy and kitten snuggle time; our Humane Society brought over some adoptable babies for playtime.
We started off with a lot of enthusiasm, and ended with a lot of enthusiasm (mainly because we just wanted to be DONE), but lagged in the middle.
Most people hated to rebarcode for more than about 1.5 hours a time, which is why we decided to treat it as an ongoing side project, rather than an exclusive task.
Barcode costs are insignificant compared to staff time.
When you order barcodes, make sure the numbers are formatted with spaces for improved readability. Example: "3 1250 20001 1156", not "31250200011156". We didn't, and wish we had.
If you are doing your whole library, it has the bonus benefit of acting as an inventory process. You can identify missing items by their non-standard barcode.
This helped build staff buy-in for Cardinal. If we were doing all this work, we better have something to show for it, and Cardinal is that something.
In the end, Cardinal makes it totally worth doing.

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