Meeting the Tides of Change with “Pick and Scan”

This article is from the spring 2025 issue of Hearsay, the semi-annual newsletter of the Wheat Law Library.

A quick glance at the history of library cataloging makes one appreciate the conveniences of our time. At least those of us who work in library technical services should be grateful that the days when library catalogs were chiseled into clay tablets are long gone. Yet, the search for faster and more efficient ways to ensure our patrons’ access to our collections is ever present.

The need for efficiency is most acutely felt during times of major change. The summer of 2024 was such a time here at the law library. Major renovations taking place at Green Hall meant that a large number of items in our collection were taken off the shelves, to be temporarily housed on a different floor in the building until the end of the construction, before making the journey to their final destination at the library. Ultimately, the changes in the physical world had to be mirrored in our databases. Fortunately, our Integrated Library System Voyager’s “Pick and Scan” feature enabled us to do this with the efficiency required by such a massive undertaking.

“Pick and Scan” is a tool that allows libraries to perform bulk updates on item records as well as their associated holdings and bibliographic records. Using this tool, we can select items by scanning their item barcodes individually or by uploading batches of record IDs, and then process batch updates to item location, status, copy number, item type and other relevant data. We relied on this feature’s time-saving qualities in updating the location information on thousands of records once the physical relocation of the items was completed. This is especially true for some of our special collections, which, after years of being shelved on the third floor, were moved to the fourth floor as part of the new spatial layout. The technical guidelines provided by the main library proved beneficial throughout the process. Overall, “Pick and Scan” is a useful tool which assisted us in helping our patrons have access to up-to-date information about our collections in a timely manner.