Assessment of Technical Services Workflow in an Academic Library:
A Time-and-Path Study
by
Patricia Dragon
and
Lisa Sheets Barricella
ABSTRACT:
In spring 2004, the Technical Services area at East Carolina University’s Joyner
Library conducted a time-and-path study of materials moving through the area from
receipt until they are ready for the shelf. This study represented the first step in an
ongoing self-assessment process. Data was gathered using flags placed in materials as
they were unpacked. Staff members filled out the flags with the description of each
processing task they completed and the date the item left their possession. This article
describes the design of the study and gives an analysis of the results, as well as detailing
some changes that could improve future studies.
KEYWORDS:
self-assessment, reengineering, technical services, time study, flags, cataloging
AUTHOR INFORMATION:
Patricia Dragon is the Special Collections Cataloger and Principal Cataloger at East
Carolina University’s Joyner Library. She holds an MILS degree from the University of
Michigan. Lisa Sheets Barricella is the Acquisitions Librarian at East Carolina
University’s Joyner Library. She holds an MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh.
Address correspondence to: Patricia Dragon (dragonp@mail.ecu.edu), Cataloging
Department, or Lisa Barricella (barricellal@mail.ecu.edu), Acquisitions Department,
Joyner Library, East Carolina University, Greenville NC 27858.
Background
East Carolina University is an expanding state university in Greenville, North
Carolina. The university has an enrollment of more than 22,000 students and is classified
as a Doctoral/Research Intensive institution by the Carnegie classification system. Joyner
Library is the main library on the East Campus of the university; it houses 1.2 million
volumes with approximately 38,000 volumes added during 2003-2004. For the past
several years, Joyner Library’s spending for monographic purchases has averaged
$900,000 per year; this figure represents approval plan and firm order books, non-serial
standing orders, media, and music scores. We receive OCLC PromptCat records for the
approximately 200 items per week that arrive on our approval plan, for which we contract
with Yankee Book Peddler.
Technical Services occupies a large, shared space and is comprised of two
departments and one unit. At the time of the study, the Acquisitions Department included
two librarians and seven full-time staff members. The Cataloging Department had three
librarians, ten full-time staff members, and one half-time staff member. The Preservation
and Conservation unit had one full-time staff member and one half-time staff member. A
number of undergraduate and graduate student assistants work in each department.
Because areas of responsibility vary widely among Technical Services personnel, we had
varying levels of involvement with the study.
In recent years, Technical Services has undergone a number of changes including
physical space reconfiguration, retirements, employee turnover, changes in the reporting
structures of both staff and librarians, and the addition of an Associate Director for
Collections and Technical Services. These changes highlighted the necessity for a
Assessment of Technical Services Workflow
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reengineering process which would assess workflows, identify common goals, build
cohesiveness between departments, and eliminate duplication of effort. The time-andpath study was designed by Technical Services librarians as a part of this reengineering
process. It was simple way of collecting data to determine where we should begin our
efforts to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our service.
Goals and Objectives
We had three goals for our study. Our first was to find out how long it takes
items to move through Technical Services from the time they are unpacked in
Acquisitions until they go to Circulation for shelving. Before the study, we could guess
or estimate the number of days, but we wanted empirical data for two reasons: first, to
decide whether improvements were necessary, and if so, what sort of improvement goals
would be reasonable. We also wanted a beginning point against which we could measure
the results of any workflow changes that we implemented.
Our second goal was to assess the time spent on each processing task in order to
identify bottlenecks in the process. We felt that bottlenecks might indicate training
needs, staffing insufficiencies, and/or breakdowns in communication. By identifying
them, we could focus our improvements to achieve the greatest benefits of increased
efficiency.
Our third goal was to analyze the paths that items took through the area. The
year before the flag study, we had reconfigured the room according to what we thought
would be the best way to move material through the room, and we were interested in
whether the flag study results would confirm the suitability of the room layout to our
Assessment of Technical Services Workflow
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workflow. We defined suitability as a minimum of handoffs of materials back and forth,
and a minimum of duplication of effort. In addition to pointing out areas for
improvement, we also hoped that the study would tell us what we were doing well.
Limitations
One important limitation of our study was that we collected data only about
certain groups of monographs. For instance, our study did not include gifts, because the
low cataloging priority level we assign to them would have skewed the time results. We
did not flag electronic resources; there would be no physical item to flag. The present
study included firm orders, non-serial standing orders, and approval plan books. We may
conduct future studies focused specifically on other types of materials, which would
provide us with valuable complementary data.
Our study was also constrained by the necessity for choosing a limited time
period. Published reports of other time studies detail various methods for determining
when to collect (and to stop collecting) data. The University of Oregon used a table of
random numbers to select 11 days over the course a semester to collect data (SlightGibney 1999). At Carnegie Mellon, staff were given a window of 45 days and told to
pick any 5 working days within the range to collect data (Hurlbert and Dujmic 2004).
Fearing that flagging only a sample of materials would cause more attention to be paid to
the flagged materials and thus give inaccurate results, we determined that we should
place flags in all qualifying items unpacked between March 15 and April 15, 2004. The
choice of season necessarily impacted our results. The end of the fiscal year was not far
off, and firm ordering funds were expended; so the volume of material was not as high as
Assessment of Technical Services Workflow
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at other times of the year. Repeating the study at other times of the year might give us
completely different results, and such repetition would be necessary to get a full picture
of processing time.
Because we measured time by the dates on which tasks were completed, the time
represented for each task includes not only processing time but also the time the books
spent waiting for that task to be performed. Therefore, our study does not show how
many minutes it takes to process an item, but rather how many days it takes to process a
large group of items. Time measured in smaller blocks would be useful, but would
require a study different than we conducted, such as the study by Carnegie Mellon
University Libraries, in which they measured completion of a task in minutes rather than
by date (Hurlbert and Dujmic 2004).
Our data has not been correlated to cost of processing, but literature by librarians
who have conducted time/cost studies is available. For instance, Iowa State University
libraries conducted a longitudinal time-and-cost study between 1987 and 2001, and many
published findings from that study provide useful information: in particular, Fowler and
Arcand (2003) and Morris, et al. (2000). The results of a time-and-cost study conducted
by the University of Oregon Library System in 1997 provides an extensive cost
examination of acquisitions and cataloging tasks (Slight-Gibney 1999).
Methodology
In designing our time-and-path study, we sought to create a process that would
allow us to gather the information we needed to meet our three goals, while at the same
time be easy to implement and not burden our staff with onerous data keeping. We got
Assessment of Technical Services Workflow
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the idea to use the flags from a summary of a study by Arizona State University Libraries
(Technical Services Review Team 2000). The basic design of our flag consisted of space
at the top for identifying information and two columns; the left was used to describe the
task performed, and the right for the date completed. To lessen the need for repetitive
writing, we decided to preprint some of the rows in the task column with standardized
descriptions, but the rest we left blank so that staff members could fill them. We
considered having people initial their rows on the flags but rejected this idea out of
concern that people would feel that the study was an attempt to evaluate individual
performance, which it was not.
[Insert figs. 1 and 2 here]
In order to be able to make comparisons between firm order and PromptCat
materials, we used two types of flags. The flag shown in Figure 1 was used for standing
order and firm order materials. Students unpacking the mail recorded the ISBN, title, and
date of receipt on a flag and placed the flag in the item. Acquisitions staff processed the
item for payment and filled out the date the item went to Cataloging. Catalogers recorded
and dated their tasks in a similar manner using a combination of empty and preprinted
rows until the item went to Circulation for shelving. Empty rows were provided for most
of the cataloging tasks because of the greater variety of possible cataloging steps in the
processing.
The second flag, shown in Figure 2, was for PromptCat materials. Because of the
standardized way in which the PromptCat books (our approval plan) flow through
Technical Services, we decided to preprint all the tasks on the PromptCat flags. Our
PromptCat books are unpacked and placed on review shelves, to be viewed and selected
Assessment of Technical Services Workflow
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by librarian “subject liaisons” (librarians with subject-specific collection development
duties) or by campus faculty. At the end of the first week, student workers remove all the
books that have been selected, alphabetize them, and send them on to Cataloging. The
others are left for a second week. From the review shelves, they then go to Physical
Processing and to Cataloging to have barcodes added to their item records. We decided
not to record identifying information on PromptCat flags because PromptCat books have
relatively few people working on them compared to firm order books. We also
anticipated that PromptCat books would take a shorter time to move through the area,
thus reducing the risk of the book and flag being separated.
For both types of flags, the final task recorded was the date on which the item left
Technical Services to go to Circulation and the flag was removed. A centrally located
box served as the collection point for the completed flags. We also notified the rest of the
library about the study so that anyone who found flags that were not removed before
going to Circulation would know to return them to Technical Services. Before the
implementation of the study, we conducted a half-hour training session for Technical
Services staff members, during which we distributed the flags and provided an
instructional handout.
Results
By keeping the study simple, we avoided the need for statistical software.
Instead, we entered all the data from the flags into Excel spreadsheets and used that
program to compute averages and generate charts. During the study, Acquisitions student
workers placed a total of 956 flags. Of these, 941 were returned within 6 months of the
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beginning of the study. After this point, since no more flags were being returned, we
disregarded the 15 flags that remained missing and removed them from all calculations.
The data we gathered was overwhelmingly for books (496 firm order, 428 PromptCat).
Because we had so few data points for other formats, we confined our analysis for this
study to the two types of book acquisitions, firm order and PromptCat.
Our first goal was to find out how long items take to move through Technical
Services from receipt to being wheeled out to Circulation for shelving. While the firm
order books took longer on average (45 days) than PromptCat books (38 days), they also
had a much greater range of total number of days: from 1 to 170 days for firm order,
compared to 10 to 58 days for PromptCat. The reason for this difference in range can be
traced to both the acquisition process and the cataloging process. Firm order books are
frequently ordered at the request of a patron, who wishes the book to be rush processed
when it is received, leading to total days at the low end of the range. Firm order books
require cataloging in-house, the time for which depends on a number of variables,
including the difficulty level of cataloging required and the number of competing
demands on catalogers’ time. By contrast, PromptCat books by definition come with
catalog records, eliminating that time variable. However, the time the PromptCat books
spend on the review shelves somewhat offsets this time savings; hence the PromptCat
books had a higher minimum number of total days, at 10.
[Insert figs. 3 and 4 here]
Does this mean that if someone should ask us how long it takes to process a book,
we should answer “45 days for firm orders, 38 days for PromptCat”? Maybe. Generally
speaking, the average result of 38 days for PromptCat is more meaningful as an
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indication of “how long it takes” than the 45 day average is for firm orders. This
difference is illustrated by Figures 3 and 4. In Figure 3, one can see that the steep slope
of the PromptCat line around the average of 38 indicates that most PromptCat books were
indeed finished in approximately 38 days. The more relaxed slope of the firm order line
indicates the wide variation in total number of days. Quite a few books were done in
fewer than 45 days; quite a few took many days longer. Figure 4 is another graphic
rendering of the same data, the regular curve in the PromptCat bars showing the majority
of books clustering at about 40 days, and the firm order bars showing much more
unpredictability. We decided that unpredictability made for less-than-stellar public
service and set about reducing it.
[Insert figs. 5 and 6 here]
Our second goal was to determine how much time was spent on each processing
task. We produced two breakdowns, Figure 5 for firm orders, and Figure 6 for
PromptCat. These pie charts were created by determining for each book surveyed what
percentage of the total number of days was spent on each task, then averaging those
percentages across all the firm order books and all the PromptCat books. In reality, the
order of tasks was not completely consistent, but we found it necessary to depict a
sequence in the pie charts.
Because our time data included waiting time, it would be inaccurate to compare
the two pie charts and conclude that physical processing for a PromptCat book (15%) is
twice as quick as for a firm order book (31%). What our data show is that for all the
books in the PromptCat process as a group, the physical processing step (including
waiting) takes a smaller average percentage of the total time. This may be influenced by
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the time that PromptCat books spend on the review shelves, which inflates the total
processing time. For the two classes of materials, the large pieces of the pies show us the
bottlenecks: for firm orders, cataloging; for PromptCat books, the review shelves. We
have taken some steps to reduce these bottlenecks.
[Insert figs. 7 and 8 here]
Our third and final goal in the study was to analyze the various paths that items
took through the room. The firm order books (Figure 7) follow two main paths. Both
paths come into Acquisitions for invoicing and then are placed on shelving holding the
firm order cataloging queue. Here, the paths diverge. The majority of items (292 of 496;
we will call this Path 1) went to Physical Processing to be barcoded, stripped, and
stamped, then to Cataloging to be cataloged, then back to Physical Processing to be
labeled. The two steps in Physical Processing could not be contiguous, because an item
must have a cataloger-assigned or verified call number before it can be labeled. A
smaller number of books (188 out of 496; we will call this Path 2) went straight to
Cataloging from the shelved queue and then to Physical Processing, where they were
stamped, stripped, barcoded, and labeled all at once. Both streams of materials left from
Physical Processing to go to Circulation. The reason for these different paths has to do
with the fact that our Physical Processing student workers, who work fixed schedules,
would quite often process uncataloged books if there were not enough cataloged books
for them to process.
Common sense dictates that Path 2 should be more efficient than Path 1, because
the books visit Physical Processing only once. Upon examining the relationship between
path and total number of days in the room, we indeed found that, on average, Path 2
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books took fewer total days (33) than Path 1 books (52 days). It is not possible to say,
however, that the workflow of Path 2 caused these books to be processed faster. These
statistics may simply be showing us that it takes longer to process 292 books than it does
to process 188.
As we expected, there was not a lot of variation in the path that PromptCat books
followed (see Figure 8). The relatively uniform workflow for PromptCat books is
unsurprising because the PromptCat service is designed to remove the complexity
variable from cataloging by providing a complete record, allowing us to use more student
labor in an assembly-line workflow. Of course, no workflow is without exception. On
both Figures 7 and 8, the smaller, dotted lines represent infrequent paths taken by 1% or
fewer of books surveyed. For instance, several books were sent by Cataloging to
Preservation for repair work or binding, several were discovered to need original
cataloger attention, and a few more had problems to be sorted out between Cataloging
and Physical Processing.
Reaction
Because we performed the study with no preconceived notions of acceptable time
findings, we were neither particularly happy nor upset about the time results. Rather, we
felt the study was a successful attempt to gather needed data. We did, however, view the
unpredictability of total processing time for firm order books to be problematic (recall
Figure 4). We have begun to address this problem by rearranging the firm order
cataloging shelves by date. During the time of the study, the shelves were arranged by
first letter of the title to facilitate the location of books identified by patrons for rush
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processing. It is easy to see how this arrangement led to the unpredictability of
processing time. Catalogers would work their way through the queue alphabetically,
pulling older and newer books that had been interfiled. By arranging the books by date
received, we are able to ensure that books received first are cataloged first. Locating rush
books now involves consulting our library system for the date received, but since the
appropriate staff were trained to do this, there have been no problems with the new
process. This change has apparently mitigated the unpredictability problem, though by
how much could be ascertained only by another study.
In addition to this change, we have taken some steps to address the bottlenecks
identified by the study (the big pieces of the pies in Figures 5 and 6). For firm order
books, the task that took the longest was cataloging. We reasoned therefore that reducing
the amount of time books waited for cataloging could have a great impact on reducing the
total processing days, and we set about doing that by adjusting staffing. One cataloger is
chiefly responsible for firm order books; others have chief responsibilities elsewhere but
pitch in to work on the firm order books when they have time. In response to the study,
we have set up a more structured triage system involving two other catalogers. When the
earliest received dates for the books on the firm order cataloging shelves is more than a
month past, these two other catalogers set aside their other work and assist the chief book
cataloger in reducing the backlog to under a month. This system has worked well,
although again the exact effect it has had on total processing time could be determined
only by a repeat study.
The bottleneck in the PromptCat process was the time the books spend on the
review shelves. This practice adds at least a week, and in many cases two weeks or more,
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to the total processing time, although the benefits of involvement by the library and
campus communities in selection may outweigh the drawbacks of this delay. In response
to the study, the Acquisitions Department has redoubled its efforts to encourage subject
liaisons to select books in a timely manner so the books get to the circulating collection
as quickly as possible. Measuring the effect of this encouragement would require another
study, but given our first-hand knowledge of how busy our subject liaisons are, it seems
likely that any effect would be temporary at best. We are also considering more farreaching changes to improve processing time, including availing ourselves of shelf-ready
services for certain groups of books. Our study has enabled us to quantify, at least
approximately, how much time could be saved by such services.
The graphic representation of the paths seemed to confirm that the layout of the
room is well-suited to our workflow and presented us with no problems that we felt
needed to be corrected. What would have concerned us would have been the passing of
materials back and forth between departments, or the same person touching materials on
multiple separate occasions. But we did not see a great deal of either of these, in large
part due to the uncomplicated materials represented in the path diagrams. A future study
that includes different types of materials may reveal problem areas unexposed by the
current study.
Problems
This study was definitely a learning experience for us. When we design our next
study, we will make several improvements. First and foremost, we will number the flags.
Tracking the number of flags so that we would be able to determine what percentage had
Assessment of Technical Services Workflow
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been returned by any given date proved problematic, because we merely asked
Acquisitions staff to keep count of how many flags had been placed. However, a
communication error resulted in an over-reporting of the number of flags placed, leading
us to wait for more than 70 additional (fictional) flags and to do quite a lot of work to
figure out what happened. In fact, we wondered if opportunistic theft of materials was
rampant in our area and considered rearranging workflow to bring physical processing
(including property stamping and tattle-taping) to the beginning of it as an emergency
measure. But many hours of investigative work later, it emerged that there had been a
counting error: additional copies of books were being counted, though a flag was not
being placed in each copy. Perhaps more training prior to the study might have alleviated
this problem, but in any case, numbering each flag would make the reporting of the
number placed very simple.
Another thing that we would change is the design of the flags. We would like to
provide some kind of standardized terminology to report actions performed on an item.
We did consider using a checklist on the flags, on which people could simply check off
and date each task they performed, but we rejected this idea because the list of possible
tasks was very long, not to mention that we did not want to influence the workflow by
appearing to predefine a path. The effect of this decision was that it was sometimes
difficult to force these free-text flags into standardized categories as was necessary for
the spreadsheets. So, for instance, “cataloging” on Figure 5 may have been recorded on
flags as copy cataloging, original cataloging, adding volumes or copies, assigning a call
number, ascertaining to which collection the book is to be added, and so on. For future
studies, however, it may benefit us to be more standardized.
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We would also like to provide a clearer method of capturing the number of staff
who touched each item. This was part of our original intent, because we suspected that
the number of “handoffs” was a strong predictor of total processing time (Freeborn and
Mugridge 2002). We intended each row of a flag to correspond to one person performing
some set of tasks on the item, and for the date on the row to be the date the item left that
person’s work area. This instruction may not have been made clear enough, because that
did not routinely happen. Some people separated each task and used several rows, while
others did not. Our pre-filled tasks also thwarted our intent, because multiple pre-filledin tasks often were performed on the same date by the same person, and we had no way
to know that, short of handwriting analysis. Designing a flag that would capture the
number of handlers and use standard terminology would be a challenge.
This challenge may be best met with some new thinking, perhaps by the staff,
which would have the additional advantage of increasing staff involvement in planning
and design of future studies. Like our reengineering process as a whole, this study was
designed by librarians. However, most of the flags were filled out by staff and student
workers. Finding ways to increase the group-ownership of this project may not only
reduce the communication errors that led to a few of our problems but also enrich the
quality of future studies with new approaches to design.
Conclusion
As we had expected, a major outcome of our study was to point to the need for
further studies. Not only will future studies be enriched by our ability to compare future
data with data from this study, but the effect of future workflow changes can be measured
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from the baseline of this data. We view self-assessment as an ongoing process and
consider our study to be an important accomplishment in setting a part of that process in
motion. The challenges facing academic library technical services departments are
familiar to all those who manage them, and work in them: ever-increasing processing
volume unaccompanied by staffing increases, higher patron expectations in an ondemand world, and keeping up with technology changes, to name a few. In light of these
challenges, the role of self-assessment in ensuring the best possible service is readily
apparent.
Bibliography
Fowler, David C., and Janet Arcand. 2003. Monographs acquisitions time and cost
studies: the next generation. Library Resources & Technical Services 47 (3): 109-124.
Freeborn, Robert B., and Rebecca L. Mugridge. 2002. The reorganization of
monographic cataloging processes at Penn State University Libraries. Library
Collections, Acquisitions, & Technical Services 26: 35-45.
Hurlbert, Terry, and Linda L. Dujmic. 2004. Factors affecting cataloging time: an inhouse survey. Technical Services Quarterly 22 (2): 1-15.
Morris, Dilys E., Collin B. Hobert, Lori Osmus, and Gregory Wool. 2000. Cataloging
staff costs revisited. Library Resources & Technical Services 44 (2): 70-83.
Slight-Gibney, Nancy. 1999. How far have we come? Benchmarking time and cost for
monograph purchasing. Library Collections, Acquisitions, & Technical Services 23
(1): 47-59.
Technical Services Review Team, “Copy cataloging time study summary, October,
2000,” Arizona State University Libraries,
http://www.asu.edu/lib/techserv/ccstudy.html (accessed December 22, 2003).
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Figure 1. Firm order Flag.
Technical Services Time Study
ISBN_____________________
Title _____________________
__________________________
Format (Circle): Book DVD
VHS Score Map Software
Book+Disc Serial Micro
Other
Task(s)
Date
Arrived Acquisitions
Unpacked
Invoiced (or Received)
Sent to Cat
Physical processing
Sent to circ/holding
library
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Figure 2. PromptCat Flag.
Technical Services Time Study
PROMPTCAT
Task(s)
Date
Arrived Acquisitions
Unpacked
Removed from review
shelves
Alphabetized
Sent to Cat
Physical processing
Edited item rec.
Sent to Circ
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Figure 3. Percentage Completed by Number of Days.
100.00%
90.00%
Percentage Completed
80.00%
70.00%
60.00%
FO Books
PromptCat Books
50.00%
40.00%
30.00%
20.00%
10.00%
0.00%
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
110
Number of Days
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Figure 4. Number Completed in Number of Days.
160
140
Number Completed
120
100
FO Books
PromptCat Books
80
60
40
20
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
55
60
65
70
75
80
85 90+
Number of Days
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Figure 5. Firm Order Books Processing Time Breakdown.
5. Sending to circ, 5%
4. Labeling, 4%
1. Invoicing, 12%
3. Physical Processing,
31%
2. Cataloging, 49%
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Figure 6. PromptCat Processing Time Breakdown.
5. Sending to circ
6%
4. Editing item record
33%
3. Physical Processing
15%
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1. On review shelf
43%
2. Alphabetizing
3%
Page 21 of 23
Figure 7. Paths of Materials During
Processing
(Firm-Order Books).
Preservation
Mail
Room
Acquisitions
Cataloging
Physical
Processing
and
Labeling
Most frequent path
2nd most frequent
path
Infrequent path
Original catalogers
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Figure 8. Paths of Materials During
Processing
(PromptCat Books).
Preservation
Mail
Room
Acquisitions
Cataloging
Physical
Processing
and
Labeling
PromptCat
display
area
Main path
Infrequent path
Original catalogers
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