We’re puzzling over our item types at the moment as part of our Voyager migration process: If item type is about loan period, why are we using material type wording to describe them instead of terms related to duration like ‘3 day loan’ ‘1 week loan’ ?

When patrons (and staff) want to limit their searches, they are often confronted by a set of choices in Material Type (taken from the leader) and Item Type which look almost identical. As a user in the past I have been puzzled when I have selected ‘book’ from item type in order to exclude serials, videos, etc and not found the title I was expecting because (as I (think I) understand now) the item was not a ‘book,’ ie normal loan period, but a reference item which did not fit in the ‘book’ category.

I would be interested to hear why libraries have persisted with this terminology instead of using loan period terminology. If anyone is aware of any libraries which are using loan period descripors or a combined terminology (eg 3 day loan books, 3 day loan serials) instead, I would be very interested in hearing of those.

Thanks

Kathryn

Cataloguing Librarian