Even before a book reaches the New Arrivals section, it goes through a long process. While you may only see the books placed on shelves waiting to be read, there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes to bring them to them. The Acquisition and Technical Unit procures books, adds records to the database, catalogs new arrivals, and prepares them with all the right labels so that they can finally be issued without a hitch. Did you ever imagine this to have so many stages?
So let’s start at the very beginning when there was no sun and the sky was dark. Okay, not that early.
Acquisition of Books
‘Who decides which books should be added to the library?’ you wonder. Not surprisingly though, each new book is added to the library on a professor’s request. Every faculty member, as well as every department, has a predetermined budget for procuring books. If you’re not keen on the fine details, you may skip the next paragraph. But hey, not like a paragraph will kill you with boredom.
Well, the professor sends an indent form to the library for the book. If he already has got the vendor for the book, the vendor’s memo is sent along with the indent form. In this case, an approval form is sent to the vendor. On the other hand, if the book has to be acquired from a to-be-known vendor, quotations are requested from various vendors and then a non-approval form is sent to the selected vendor requesting the book.
Interestingly all the figures and details related to new acquisitions are available online (within the IITK network).
Accessioning (Now that’s a cool word isn’t it?)
Now that the book has reached the library, the next step is adding the book to the library records. Details of the book are entered into the accession register. Each book is given a unique number called the accession number which is usually of the form AXXXXXX (where the Xs represent some Arabic numerals). This number acts as a primary means of identification. It is worth mentioning that the accession number is not related to the type of book in any way.
Cataloging
To make finding books easy, the library follows a system known as the Dewey Decimal Classification in which related books are placed together. DDC is used in libraries all over the world and uses the ideas of relative location and relative index. The classification’s notation makes use of three-digit Arabic numerals for main classes, with decimals for further details. This classification provides the call number of the book.
Another number given is the cutter number which is constructed from the title, the author’s name and other details like edition.
Let’s see an example to wrap this around our heads. Consider the book in the image, ‘A Walk Through Combinatorics’ by Miklos Bona. It has call number 511.6. This can be explained by the following classification hierarchy:
500 Natural sciences and mathematics
510 Mathematics
511 General topics
511.6 Combinatorics
Now notice the cutter number B64w3. The ‘B’ stands for Bona, the author’s name. The ‘w’ comes from ‘Walk’ in the title and the ‘3’ is for the third edition.
Who knew those seemingly random characters could make so much sense!
Hopefully, now you are slightly better equipped to understand those weird numbers on books, and how they’re not really that weird. The arrangement of books on the shelves starts making more sense and you can even guess why there are so many books in the 500s and considerably fewer in the 100s or so.
This classification is not always very easy to do. For instance, ‘A Companion to Popular Culture’ sounds like it is about culture and gets 306(the class for cultural books) as its main class. But can you tell where you should put ‘Young Tableaux’ by Fulton? (No, we don’t have a goddamn clue either). You probably realize that classification is no meek task, and so, hats off to those who get this work done day and day so that we find easily what we need.
Once classified, details about the book with these numbers are added to the records as a MARC 21 entry. MARC stands for MAchine Readable Cataloging. MARC is the international standard for bibliographic records.
Tooling
Once the book is cataloged, it is sent for getting dressed up, or, more technically, the process of tooling. Various labels with the numbers mentioned earlier and barcodes are then put on the book. The barcodes make the process of issuing and returning considerably seamless. Some other things like the card pocket and date slip are also attached in this step.
To the Present
And finally, the book is ready to hit the New Arrivals display. All the books procured in the last week are displayed for a week starting Monday. Those emails you get every week?
The library is not just a big bunch of books but many people working together to bring to the readers a great reading experience. While most of us may not know much of their work, we have tried to give you a glimpse of what actually goes on behind the scenes and how much effort is required to make everything work smoothly.
A hearty thanks to the amazing library staff to help us with the info and making this series possible, and leaving us wondering how much we are yet to learn about our own college.
Written by – Farzan Byramji and Sarvesh Bajaj
Edited by – Hemant Kejriwal
In case you are sneaking around for the other chapters of the story, here they are:
