Item Records and Volume Control

Producing complete and accurate Item Records is a big part of maintaining a useful database within our shared catalogue. Most importantly for providing services to Patrons and for Staff to find items on the shelves, but also for proper statistics and system functionality.

You should have reviewed the “Creating and Editing Item Records” and “Volume Control” materials soon after being hired within your library. Reviewing these documents and taking the two quizzes are required training for Public Library Staff and Volunteers who add or edit Item Records in Polaris. If you do regularly work with Item Records it may be worthwhile to review these documents occasionally.

Going forward I will be your primary contact regarding the Item Records and Volume Control quizzes, both marking and providing feedback. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me if you have questions regarding these.

Every part of an Item Record has a function, although some fields are optional or used on an “as needed” basis, and others rarely change from their default values.

As you know, there are some fields on an Item Record that Collection Services Staff at PLS will not touch or use when we process your materials. This includes the “Shelf location” and “Temporary location” fields, as we don’t know the layout of or your space and the specific place or display you will put an item on. Similarly, we do set the “Collection” on a general level, but we won’t specify a genre section such as “Western” and may use the best guess between choices such as “Young Adult” and “Fiction – Young Adult” if you have both. We fill out as much as we can as best we can, but you or your Staff should review them for completeness and to fit your needs.

One of the most important fields on an Item Record is the “Volume” section. As the documents on our website say, this field is a particularly sensitive field. It is used for multiple part works, and Polaris will change how Hold Requests are performed depending on how this field is filled. Therefore, TRAC has very specific and strict requirements for how these fields are filled out. On a weekly basis I review reports to ensure that these fields are filled out properly by Staff in our System. I definitely recommend keeping this chart at hand when processing any items.

 PDF Volume Field Formatting Chart 

There is also a Volume Field Cheat Sheet for Magazines on our website.

Thank you all for working diligently to keep Item Records complete and accurate! Please let me know if you have any questions.

All the best,

Ken Sawdon
Collection Services Manager