Over 3 Million Titles and French Location Numbers: How StackMap is Helping

The Université Laval in Québec has an enormous library system, with a collection of over three million items spanning multiple floors. However, such expanse means excessively long call numbers that patrons struggle to locate. We talked with librarian Isabelle Chabot about how StackMap has become an imperative resource for item-finding:

When you’re a student and you come into this big library nothing makes sense. The H call number is divided between three different floors, but now that we have StackMap, everyone is using it and everyone is trusting it. Even employees are using StackMap to locate everything. I found that employees were trusting StackMap more than themselves. 

Isabelle has great insight about what it’s like integrating the program in a non-English collection:

We had to make sure the special accents and letters in French went through. StackMap worked very hard to fix everything, including our very long location numbers, such as “Pav. Jean-Charles-Bonenfant - Bibliothèque - Centre GéoStat - Périodiques (4e étage) - Consultation sur place”. I think every location number that we have has a special character; it’s not on purpose; it just happens that way. So, we discovered that for certain letters we need to put a comma instead of a dot. After their test, they provided a procedure so I would know what settings to change in order to have it work correctly.

—Isabelle Chabot, bibliothécaire systèmes at the Université Laval