Shelf Ready Doesn\u27t Always Mean Ready for the Shelf

The Acquisitions and Cataloging Departments at American University have embarked on a partnership whereby an acquisitions specialist uses a cataloging checklist to check various aspects of shelf ready records for correctness and accuracy. Any books that don\u27t meet the requirements of the checklist are automatically routed to the Cataloging Department for additional copy cataloging. Over the course of several years of refining the checklist, the number of approvals bypassing Cataloging has gone from 24% to 60%, which has freed up the Cataloging Department to work on more original and complex cataloging work. This has also led to other collaborations between the two units