Yesterday was another day that I got too busy to blog for #blogjune, so today will be another two-blog post-day.

At my library, our ebook collection has grown at a much faster rate than our print book collection. In the twenty-plus years that I’ve been here, we’ve gone from having a handful of ebooks to over 1,068,000. Our print collection has 277,000 books, which represents 21 percent of the total number of books we have. One thing that continues to annoy me (and others in libraries) is the limited metadata that comes with ebooks, which makes discovery of them harder. One piece of metadata is notably absent: a call number. This makes sense that call numbers are not displayed or often even in the record for ebooks, as there is no singular shelf location you need to get to to find the book; instead, there’s merely a link to the full text.

One downside of this situation is that a sometimes useful way to browse a collection, by an online display of sequential call numbers, is no longer useful if it only shows some of your books. Our discovery system, Primo VE, does have a browse by call number feature, but using it means you’ll only be seeing a fifth of the books we actually have. While it’s true to finding books by call number browse is not always the best way to find relevant works, if you’ve found one relevant work, the ones sitting nearby according to call number range are also very likely to be relevant (a concept that I recall from my library school days as “collocation”). I can see that some of our ebook records actually have a call number in the 050 field, but I don’t know why that information isn’t displayed in the record or used as part of the browse functionality. I’ll have to ask my colleagues who know more about these things.