Braille Survey

We have been made aware of a survey that NLS has sent to libraries that distribute Braille materials, and we are working on a report that will help libraries evaluate their collections for responding to the survey.

The survey has to do with the number of incomplete Braille volumes in your collection, and evaluating the need for replacement volumes. It is due by Friday July 30, 2021.

I'll have more details about our report for you on Monday, but in the meantime, if you have any questions or requests feel free to post them here!

(Note: we will not be sending any information about this direct to NLS. When the report is finished, either you can run it or we can run it for you, but either way--the results will only be sent to you.)

After reviewing the existing reports in KLAS regarding the questions in this survey, we have noted that while the Holdings Summary will give you a Number of Items (Volumes) NAC in a given Media - it does not express the number of Titles/Copies represented by those NAC items. So we are proposing a new report that counts incomplete copies per title and provides usage info for the title to help determine if replacement volumes are desireable. 

We would appreciate feedback on questions you have or additional selection parameters or output that you would find useful.

Parameters -

• Media to evaluate
• OUT Cut-off date - if an item was checked out prior to this date consider it non-circulate-able

For summary counts

• # of titles with holdings/copies
• # of titles with Circulate-able copies
• # of titles with incomplete copies (NAC volumes or long term OUT)
• # items NAC
• # items long term OUT

For Detail List

• KLAS ID
• Title
• Author
• GradeCode/Reading Level
• Language
• Title Status
• # Volumes
• # Copies
• # Circulate-able copies
• # Items NAC
• # Items long term OUT
• Last Cir Date
• Copies Circulated LTD
• Copies Circulated 1 Year
• Copies Circulated 5 Year
• # Requests
• # Reserves

We are particuarly interested to know if there is additional information that you would find helpful in evaluating a titles to determine if replacement volumes are warranted.

Hi Mitake, this looks great! I love the parameters you've included. A couple of things to consider, we use NAC IRP status for braille we are repairing. Can NAC IRP be considered the same status as AVL? Also, will the NAC include LUN as well as LOS items?

Hi Mitake. This looks pretty good to me. My only question is, does the report indicate which volumes are missing for a given title? That is, will it say "BR XXXXX is missing two volumes" or will it say "BR XXXXX is missing volumes one and five" or both? I would want the specific volumes included, if possible. Thank you!

In my first draft of this I was just looking at CirStatus - so all items that were NAC regardless of MatStatus were included in the NAC count - I will see what we can do adjust for various MatStatuses.
Thanks for the feedback!

So in my test run - I am looking at just short of 9k NAC items over the course of 22k titles for the database that I am testing in. I'm hesitant to add rows to list out the NAC volumes. I could try adding a column that concatenates the Item names for the NAC items (with the caveat that I see a number of entries with 10+ items NAC - so that list could be rather long).