Page 86 - DLIS104_MANAGEMENT OF LIBRARIES AND INFORMATION CENTRES

Unit 13: Storage and Maintenance Section

13.2.2 Stock Rectification and Stock Verification Notes

Stock verification or physical verification is to periodically check and account for the documents
acquired by a library. Stock verification is an insignificant aspect of librarianship as far as teachers,
researchers and library experts are concerned. But in practice stock verification is considered as a
sensitive, controversial and unwanted evil activity. Practicing librarians are often perturbed and
worried over the process of library stock verification and its results and implications. The spirit
and philosophy of librarianship towards books as emotion filled animate beings dissipates when
books are subjected to stock verification. As such some consider stock verification as one of the
occupational hazards. The other hazards include mutilation of documents and loss in transit of
supplies. Stock verification is often done like a ritual without clear identification of aims and
objectives and hence a host of confusion surrounds stock verification. If the objectives and procedures
of physical verification and responsibilities about loss of documents are clearly enumerated, the
process becomes plain and simple.

Advantages of stock verification
A library should also take note of some advantages in carrying out stock verification. Firstly,
periodic stock verification and write off of resultant loss helps to reduce unnecessary escalation in
book value of assets. Secondly, physical verification also helps in replacing relevant, useful and on
demand documents with new copies wherever lost or mutilated. Thirdly, stock verification is the
time to introduce new ways of arrangement of stack, modified or new lending system and other
procedures. Fourthly, if a library calls back all issued out documents for stock verification purpose,
it can provide an opportunity for its users to browse the entire collection after verification. This
very much counters the otherwise bias of less useful books lying on shelves all through the year.
Fifthly, stock verification helps to review the precautionary measures already taken in preventing
loss and mutilation as well as to identify any deficiencies in the existing procedure of maintenance
of library and vigilance. Above all, stock verification helps as a way of identifying and discarding
obsolete volumes. Normally in an active collection of a well organised library, loss of on-demand
books are only noticed in day to day working. Other incidental benefits of stock verification
include identification of damaged and worn-out documents for repair or rebinding, keeping shelf
list and other records up-to-date, rearrangement and cleaning of stack, better acquaintance of
collection and popular documents by library staff, etc.

Methods of stock verification
As far as methods of carrying out stock verification are concerned the parent organization may
involve or may not involve external persons in the team of stock verification and may decide to
exclude certain types of material in the library. The rest of the methodology of verification depends
on the provisions already made in the design and organization of library records. There are a
number of methods followed for stock verification. The crudest method is to numerically count
the number of documents and it practically does not serve any purpose except to know the number
of documents lost. The old and fairly crude method is to physically check and tally documents on
shelves with accession register. This method is not only cumbersome and time consuming but also
require the entire register to be kept while checking. It may also lead to spoiling the register with
tick marks. However, with the advent of new ways of reproduction of accession register now the
original register can still be saved.
Another accession number based scheme which also has the disadvantage of keeping the entire
register is to have prewriting/typed/printed cards carrying accession numbers in blocks of 100
numbers while physically checking the documents on shelves. In both these methods the
simultaneous working of number of batches depends on availability of number of copies of
accession register or its surrogate and if more than one copy of accession register is used the results
of checking needs to be consolidated from different copies/batches. All these not only make it
cumbersome but also lead to waste of time and efforts. It is also possible now with the proliferation
of personal computers to just key-in all accession numbers as and when checked to consolidate the
loss in terms of missing accession numbers.

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