MultiLIS Book Exchange Process: A “Shuttle” Approach to Collection Development

This article describes the automated inventory management of rotating collections and may be applied to any such collections including reserve book rooms, book mobiles, interbranch loans and regional libraries. As a result of 10 years of planning and implementation and a half million dollar investment, all regional libraries in the Province of Quebec use mathematical models and multiLIS software to manage the collections of remote libraries. The software tracks the placement of materials based on number and exchange periods, rate of exchange, delivery routes, size of library's inventory, length of each item's stay in the collection and many other criteria. MultiLIS will produce book lists, bibliographies and catalogs.