Software Challenges

My software challenge for the summer is updating ~5,000 bibliographic (bib) records, ~35 records at a time. Last night I had a breakthrough, but the more I think about it, I'm not sure of the best way to do it.

Here's the scenario. The library moved 7,000+ items out to "closed stacks." With some of those periodicals and law serials, there are actually fewer bib records than there are items. That works because all 130+ volumes of the Federal Practice Digest are part of the same bib record.

With the books in closed stacks--only library staff are allowed to retrieve and reshelve materials, so we are more worried about being able to locate the book than that a user finds the books with similar books. While we've maintained call number order within shelves, we haven't worried about the flow of call numbers from one section of shelving to the next or one row to the next.

As a result, the best way to locate a book is to know which shelf it is on. We've numbered all the shelves to identify them. Now we just need to add that shelf number to the bib record for each of the 35 or so books on each shelf.

We've scanned the books to create a table that tells us which barcodes are on which shelves. I can run a query and find which bib record is associated with each of the barcodes. Now how to do the updating.
- Pull up each record individually and make the edit for more than 5,000 records. It seems a bit overwhelming and VERY tedious.
- Copy each shelf (250+) of records into a third-party software program, make the change to all the records at once using a VB script, and move the records back into our catalog. I had a breakthrough last night on this one, so I'm now positive it can be done! The process takes a LOT of steps and would have to be repeated for EACH shelf--still sounds quite tedious.
- Open up each record for a shelf within the catalog program and make the change to all the open records at once using a third-party software. Requires at least one mouse click (or maybe a shortcut keystroke) to open EACH record, but maybe still the most effient overall?

I'm talking with I.T. about the possibility of the last one, since it would require them granting some extra privileges.