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9.16. Appendix P: Shelving Locations

Last Updated 04/10/2025

What are Shelving Locations?

Shelving locations are important indicators to help patrons find items in the library and may be used for circulation policies.  A shelving location must be applied to every item in the catalog. 

These shelving locations are "owned" at the consortium level and should be used as much as possible. In order to help Evergreen run more efficiently and minimize the number of shelving locations that appear in circulation reports, the consortium consolidated shelving locations in NC Cardinal and continues to encourage libraries to use existing shelving locations, rather than requesting additional ones. Each additional shelving location for circulating materials impacts every library's circulation reports, as the more shelving locations there are (even at the system level), the more lines show up in monthly circulation reports and annual Public Library Survey data collection. 

System level shelving locations may be added for substantial collections if absolutely necessary for correct circulation or for patrons to find materials in the library. However, most small collections do not need their own shelving location. Particularly when smaller subsets of items are shelved within the same area of the library as a larger 'umbrella' collection of similar material, the recommended practice is to use the 'umbrella' shelving location to get patrons to the right section of the library and then use call number/prefix/suffix options, signage, shelf tags/labels, and spine stickers to point the patron to any smaller groups within the larger collection.

When selecting a shelving location, it is important to pay attention to the settings for Holdable, OPAC Visible, and Circulate:

• Holdable=YES means the items assigned to that shelving location are holdable based on applicable hold policies, unless the item record is marked Holdable=False or the item has an item status that is Holdable=False.
• Holdable=NO means the items assigned to the shelving location will never be holdable, regardless of other settings, although staff can override in some situations.
• OPAC Visible=YES means that the items are visible to patrons in the OPAC, unless the items are in an item status that is OPAC visible=False. 
• OPAC Visible=NO means the items assigned to the shelving location will never be visible to patrons in the OPAC.
• Circulate=YES means that items assigned to that shelving location are eligible to circulate based on applicable circulation policies, unless the item record is marked Circulate=False. For items in an item status where Is Available=False, staff will see a pop-up message on the checkout screen indicating the non-standard status.
• Circulate=NO means the items assigned to the shelving location will never circulate, unless staff choose to override.

Structure of a Shelving Location Name

In 2017 NC Cardinal went through a shelving location consolidation and came up with our naming conventions for shelving locations. We generally follow this format.

• (Audience) Adult, Juvenile, Young Adult, Easy, Professional
• Foreign Language, Large Print
• New, Storage
• Fiction, Nonfiction
• NC, Local History
• (All the other qualifiers) Audiobook, Battle of the Book, Biography, Boardbook, Caldecott, Christian, Display, Government Documents, Graphic Novel, History, Holiday, Kit, Magazine, Music, Mystery, Outreach, Oversize, Paperback, Reader, Reference, Romance , Science Fiction, Series, Short Story, Spanish, Video, Video R, Western

Video should be used rather than DVD or Blu-ray

Note for catalogers: Holdings tags for batch import must use the exact format, spelling, and capitalization shown.