This poster discusses a project to oversee the quality control and brief description of over 21,000 rare and unique items donated to the library in an unprocessed “backlog” spanning decades. The goals of this project include making the material discoverable and requestable by researchers, establishing labour benchmarks for material processing, and assigning an appropriate receiving library to items for inventory control in preparation for the cataloguing unit’s move to a new physical location.

Following a system migration from Sierra to Alma, the library was left with over 21,000 unprocessed items that were not represented in the library’s discovery system. Lacking the staffing resources to catalogue these donations in our operational daily work, a term library assistant was hired to help complete a full inventory and create brief access records for these unprocessed items.

Engaging in a backlog inventory project and gathering data throughout will allow us to develop benchmarks for future projects and large donation processing for rare and unique material – a consistently de-prioritized area of the cataloguing unit’s workload.