The session "Moving Mountains: Exciting Trends in Library Delivery
Services" was an excellent program offered at ALA and there was even
room to come into the room and sit down to enjoy it. The presentation
began with Brenda Bailey-Hainer providing an overview of the numerous
initiatives underway in the area of physical delivery of library
materials. She let people know about the Moving Mountains project website at
http://www.clicweb.org/movingmountains/ which grew out of symposium
held in Denver in 2006 (see
http://www.clicweb.org/movingmountains/agenda.html) which focused on
physical delivery of items. A followup meeting was held the following
year in Chicago.
She also mentioned the Rethinking Resource Sharing website at
http://rethinkingresourcesharing.org/ and talked about the various
working groups that are part of that group including Interoperability,
Delivery, User Needs, and Marketing.
Brenda spoke very coherently about the history of all these activities
but I came late so I missed some of the details. Sorry, Brenda.
Next, Valerie Horton (of Colorado Library Consortium) spoke about a
proposal to build a national courier service. She identified many of
the issues that would need to be overcome in order to implement such a
system such as developing a consistent system for packaging items,
labeling packages (with destination and routing information), managing
items and deciding how to charge for the service.
She presented some data showing the 'per piece' costs of delivering
items under 2 pounds within 3 days. The costs ranged from 39 cents
per piece (using some regional courier services) to as high as $4.50
using some commercial services.
Horton proposed a nationwide system of 4-6 overlapping regions that
would piggyback on existing courier service but which could be managed
regionally. She thought such a regional system would allow for some
flexibility within regions while providing linkages across regions.
The idea would be to create links to adjacent regions for delivery but
when items needed to move across multiple regions, a commercial
service provider like UPS would be used. In other words, create a
supportive national system without recreating another UPS or USPS
service run by librarians.
Her belief is that any national system would have to be able to get
transit time for packages down to 2-3 days, cost less than $2-$3/
package and be cheaper and faster than the U.S. Mail.
Bruce Smith was next on the agenda. He spoke about his work in
Wisconsin managing a very large library delivery service that includes
deliveries to individual branches of a large public library system, 29
campus stops for the University of Wisconsin, 52 stops to public
libraries in the region plus a connection to another state system
(Minitex).
He says that his goal is to try to simultaneously limit volume while
being able to handle ever higher volumes of materials through the
delivery system. At this point, he estimates the cost of moving an
item from one system to another is 72 cents and only 10 cents to move
an items within a system.
He noted that volume has increase as much as 1910% in one system and
500% in others. In other words, delivery requirements are going up
everywhere and skyrocketing in some places.
He made some suggestions for how to handle the volume:
1) floating collections (don't return items if it isn't necessary)
2) reduce transportation holds (fill requests locally whenever possible)
3) cluster (delivery items 'down route' whenever possible)
4) cooperative collection development
Here's some other tips I managed to pick up from Bruce:
- When planning delivery systems, he noted that every second helps so
pay attention to the details (e.g. make labels easy to read).
- Work toward a high driver load ratio (fewer trucks with bigger loads
are cheaper than a lot of small trucks or vans)
- Use the Cart-Tech Tote master that he designed to save the backs of
the drivers
-Use diesel trucks even though they are more expensive to buy, they
last longer and get better mileage - even better use bio-diesel
-Standardize on a truck and reuse old parts
Brenda Bailey-Hainer closed the session with information about the
need for convenient services such as Home Deliver and referenced some
libraries already doing it:
Contra Costa County (charges $3/delivery)
Topeka & Shawnee: made a big investment in home delivery and providing
book drops available all around the county. Their thinking is that it
is cheaper to provide these services out into the community than try
to open anther branch. they have $264,272 budget for their virtual
branch which include the home delivery and it is wildly popular. No
Holds shelves needed!
She talked about the OCLC pilot in Montana...but no one know really
how that is going yet.
She mentioned that one of the Rethinking Resource Sharing working
groups is Delivery and it tentatively came up with a tag line:
YourLibrary@Home. We'll see where that goes.
She mentioned that there will be another Moving Mountains symposium
2008 or 2009.
Then the floor was opened up to general comments and suggestions.
Here's what I gleaned from that:
1) use bulk rate packaging to send items via USPS
2) might be worth figuring out how much volume is really being sent
via ILL that would need that statewide system (although I would argue
that once it was available, it would increase demand immediately)
3) Polk County, Florida ships 1500/months directly to patron's homes
4) someone said Orange County uses a courier service to do their home
delivery (I'm not so sure about that....)
5) how about setting up a place on one of the websites to start
capturing data about costs and volumes in one place
6) someone mentioned that Australia does floating collections across
systems (e.g. not just within a county system)
7) try in-demand purchases - purchase items and send them directly to
customer rather than to library first for items with long Hold queues
8) the new Google Book search can supposedly tell by someone's IP
address whether they are associated with a library and will provide
full text if they are allowed to (based on the patrons connection to
the library)
9) Bruce told us in response to a question that he figures it costs
him $8-$10 per delivery stop
10) I suggested that we set up some kind of library patron
registration service so that anyone could borrow from any library as
long as they had a valid library card from someone (or maybe a
national library card?).
It was a good meeting. Talking about delivery is surprisingly interesting!
Submitted by Lori Ayre (loriayre@gmail.com)
=============
Lori Bowen Ayre
The Galecia Group
lori.ayre@galecia.com
(707) 763-6869
