What’s Your Number? Building Bridges in Collection Development Through Call Number Assignment and Reporting

The University of South Florida Libraries implemented annual report cards to reflect collection growth in 12 critical areas of collection development. These report cards are created using data gathered from Alma Analytics which are based on LC Classification. It became imperative for USF Libraries to place call numbers on as many electronic resources as possible to improve the accuracy of our statistical reporting. In the face over 100,000 electronic resources without call numbers, the cataloging team developed a programmatic solution to add call numbers to these records. The process includes exporting MARC records from Alma, using a Python program to harvest call numbers and insert into the MARC fields, and reloading records back into Alma. This process proved to be highly productive and saved the cataloging team many hours of manual work and increased the accuracy of our annual report cards.