If shelf reading is a good way to locate misshelved books, what about shelf reading the online catalog? It has a couple of benefits: you see what the patrons see, and you can do it from home without any special access.
Here are two ways I look for mistakes in the online catalog – one similar to shelf-reading and one a little different. {I’ll give details — in parentheses — for some of the steps for BiblioCommons catalogs because that’s what I’m familiar with.}
The first step is just to do a search of the catalog. You can do a search which returns the whole catalog {for BiblioCommons, I use “OnOrder:FALSE”}, or you can look at a slice of the catalog — such as a particular format.
Once you have the search results, sort them by title and then start reading! If you have more than one person doing this “shelf reading”, you can look at the URL of the search results page to see if it includes a page number. If so, you can edit the URL so that different people can start at different places in the search results.
What you’re looking for — other than errors which just jump out at you — are titles which you hold in different formats. Because you’ve sorted the results by title, these items will appear one after the other, making it easy to check that the author’s name is spelled the same each time (a difference that might indicate duplicate Name Authority Records) and that there are no typos in the title.
The other check you can do is a lot less labor-intensive — you can get the catalog to tell you what is in the catalog.
First, do a search which returns the whole catalog. Then, on the search results page, go to the search facets — sometimes called filters, sometimes on the left-hand side and sometimes on the right. The great thing about these search facets is that the facets will normally be pre-populated with values from the catalog. You may need to open up the facet to see all the values. {In a BiblioCommons catalog, you may also need to click on “See More” to see the whole list of values.}
Look at facets like publication date or language. What you’re looking for is values that don’t make sense. When you find an incorrect value, or just a suspicious one, select it so that the catalog displays the item(s) that match the suspicious value. Just this morning I found a biography of Elon Musk which was published in 1632 — I’m pretty sure that was an error.
There’s one extra thing you might be able to do depending on which OPAC you have. When you do an author search, some OPACs show you a list of matching authors, and then allow you to page backwards and forwards through the entire author list. If your OPAC provides this “feature”, scanning this list is another way to look for authors with duplicate entries (n.b., not counting “See” entries).
If you follow these steps, you will have checked the two most important item attributes (author and title) as well as some of the other attributes that patrons use to select items.