The Hidden Cost of Unlabelled or Mislabelled Library Assets

For collections managers, librarians and institutional procurement teams

Every library has them. The spine label that's peeled away to a sticky ghost. The specimen with a handwritten tag so faded it reads as a smudge. The journal volume that went missing three years ago and shows as "on shelf" in the catalogue to this day.

Individually, these feel like minor frustrations. Collectively, they represent a surprisingly significant drain on staff time, institutional credibility, and in the case of natural history and research collections irreplaceable scientific value.

The cost of poor labelling rarely appears in a budget line. But it's there.

The time cost: what "just a minute" adds up to

When a label is missing, damaged, or illegible, someone has to compensate. That might mean:

• Cross-referencing a physical item against a catalogue record to re-establish its identity

• Re-labelling an item by hand and then hoping that hand writing remains legible in five years

• Escalating a query to a senior colleague who remembers where something "should" be

• Logging a missing item, investigating, and updating records accordingly

Each of these tasks takes minutes. Multiplied across a working week, across a team, across a year, the picture changes considerably. A study by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) found that administrative inefficiency, including asset management and physical cataloguing issues, accounts for a disproportionate share of non-service staff time in public and academic libraries.

For herbarium and specialist collections, the stakes are even higher. Mis-identified or unlabelled specimens can corrupt entire research datasets. The cost isn't just hours - it's the integrity of the scientific record.

The retrieval cost: when assets become unfindable

A mislabelled item is, functionally, a lost item. It may be physically present sitting, on a shelf, in a drawer, in a cabinet, but if it cannot be reliably located and identified, it cannot be used.

This has knock-on consequences that ripple well beyond the collections room:

For libraries: A patron requests an item shown as available. Staff cannot locate it. The item is eventually found mis-shelved due to an incorrect or missing spine label. The patron has already left. A complaint is logged.

For herbariums: A researcher queries a specimen linked to a published paper. The physical specimen, the primary evidence, cannot be verified because its label data does not match the catalogue entry. The research cannot be corroborated.

For institutional audits: Regulators, funders, or governing bodies request evidence of collection condition and completeness. Gaps in labelling translate directly into gaps in the audit trail. In some sectors, this carries compliance risk.

The replacement cost: what gets written off

Assets that cannot be found eventually get written off. For standard library stock, this means replacement purchasing - a cost that is both direct (buying the item again) and indirect (the staff time to identify the gap, raise a purchase order, process the acquisition, and catalogue the replacement).

For unique or rare items, archival documents, herbarium specimens, historical maps, there is no replacement. The loss is permanent. And in many cases, the loss only becomes apparent years after the fact, when deteriorating or missing labels make it impossible to trace what was once held.

The reputational cost: trust in your collection

Institutions with well-maintained, clearly labelled collections are taken seriously. They attract research partnerships, loan requests, and funding applications. They pass inspections cleanly.

Collections with chronic labelling problems, however excellent the underlying material, invite doubt. Are the records accurate? Can the items be trusted? Is the collection being properly cared for?

For publicly funded institutions in particular, demonstrable stewardship of assets is not optional. It is a condition of continued support.

The root cause: systems that rely on individual effort

Most labelling problems in institutional collections are not the result of carelessness. They are the result of systems that place too much reliance on individual handwriting, individual memory, and individual consistency.

Handwritten labels vary. They fade. They peel. The person who wrote them may no longer work at the institution. The abbreviations they used may be unrecognisable to anyone else.

This is not a staffing problem. It is a systems problem, and it has a straightforward solution.

What good labelling looks like

Institutions that have moved to pre-printed, standardised labelling report measurable improvements in retrieval accuracy, catalogue integrity, and staff efficiency. The key advantages are consistency of format, durability of materials, and legibility over time.

Archival-quality pre-printed labels, produced to standards such as BS 4971 for the care of collections, are designed to remain legible and adhered for decades, not years. For herbarium specimens in particular, labels that can withstand humidity, temperature variation, and the passage of time are not a luxury; they are the minimum standard for responsible collection management.

When label format is standardised, catalogue records are easier to maintain. When barcode or QR fields are built into the label design from the outset, digital and physical records stay aligned. When reordering is simple and consistent, collections never fall into the ad hoc handwritten interim that so often becomes permanent.

Start with an audit

If you are unsure of the scale of the labelling problem in your collection, a simple audit is a useful starting point. Walk a representative sample of your collection and record:

• How many items have no label at all?

• How many have labels that are partially or fully illegible?

• How many have labels that do not match current catalogue entries?

• How many items are effectively "unlocalised" - present but not reliably findable?

The answers are rarely comfortable. But they are almost always actionable.

Good labelling is not glamorous. It rarely features in a strategic plan or an annual report. But it is the foundation on which everything else, cataloguing accuracy, research integrity, audit compliance, patron trust, depends.

The cost of getting it wrong is hidden. The cost of getting it right is not nearly as high as you might think.

Interested in archival-quality pre-printed labels for your library or herbarium collection? Request a sample pack to see how a consistent labelling system could work for your institution.