A Data Analysis Of Mis-shelved Books

Mis-shelved books must be occurred in a library that is housed on open shelves.Every academic library which houses large-scale collections but with limited human resources must deal with the problem that how to reduce the quantities of mis-shelved books efficiently.Based on the foresaid situation,mis-shelved books' data was collected from annual shelf-reading project in University of Macau Wu Yee Sun Library and then finding the rules and characteristics from mis-shelved books' data.Moreover,to analyze and compare four sets of mis-shelved books'data which was collected from four Macao academic libraries,thus finding the similarity and differences among these four sets of data.After investigation and analysis,the following evidences were found:(1)The majority data of mis-shelved books are regular and there are only few books mis-shelved maliciously.Furthermore,the numbers of mis-shelved books,check-out rates and the numbers of books both have high positive correlation with each other;(2)Mostly the value difference between correct and incorrect classification number is within 10 and the case that only one incorrect digit in the classification number was found most frequently;(3)The decimal error in classification number accounts for 28%of the total mis-shelved books and digital permutation errors in classification numbers happened due to negligence;(4)There are common errors found in mis-shelved books' data of four Macao Academic libraries therefore the rules of mis-shelved books are not fortuitous but correlation.In conclusion,there are two suggestions to the foresaid discoveries:(1)To revise the strategy of stack maintenance through the discoveries and rules from mis-shelved data;(2)To establish error table of classification number by using the data of mis-shelved books to optimize stack maintenance.