Hold It
[Note: This is a long-ish rant, but I think it's worth the time.]

Maybe this goes a little far afield, but stick with it as it does get back to the idea of technology in libraries...

Where I work (as a Materials Handler Technician in Douglas County Libraries), a decent portion of my job is locked up in filling patron requests for materials to be kept on hold for them at the library. It starts with a good hour of compiling the lists of those holds that have expired or been canceled and subsequently pulling those off the holds shelves and processing them back into the system. Then comes about an hour of compiling and printing the list of that day's requested materials to be pulled off our various collections' shelves to fill new patron holds. That is followed by four to six hours of actually pulling the materials that were requested from our branch, processing those materials, and getting them ready to go where they need to go. On top of that, throughout the day, we spend around six hours printing slips for the materials that will fill holds at our branch and shelving said materials for patron pick up and check out. The next day, we start over again with the expired and canceled holds.

Obviously, one person does not do all of these tasks, but all of us in my department (25 or so at my branch) participate in nearly every step of the process each week. We had a district wide performance study done on this process late last year, and we found that across the board at Douglas County Libraries, we used over 25% of our budgeted time on holds for patrons.

In short, it is a big part of what we do.

Now, all of this is made possible by our library technology (See? Here it is!). Patrons place their holds via our computer system, whether from home, at the library computers, or by having a staff member place a request for some item that is checked out or only available from another branch. We use the computer to call up the list, then our computer system tracks the materials' physical locations and tells us when the hold has expired. It's all pretty neat and efficient, at least until the human element is factored in.

In a best case scenario, it can take up to three days to receive a hold item from when a patron makes the request to when it appears on the shelf for pick up. Here, "best case" means that the item is on the shelf at one of our branches rather than checked out by another patron. This is due to the fact that we only compile a list of items to pull from the shelf once a day, in the morning. This is district standard, and it can take most of the day to find all of the items on the list. Then the items must be transported from branch to branch by our courier. He usually only makes one circuit of the district every day in the wee hours of the morning, though we do on occasion have a second delivery in the early afternoon. Then the items delivered are processed at the branch and made ready to shelve. Each step (pulling, transport, processing) can take up to a day to finish.

Few of our patrons seem to understand that the process takes time. Someone might put in a request for a hold at the library in Castle Rock for a book that is at the library in Highlands Ranch at 10:00 in the morning. Then that patron is annoyed that the book has not arrived in Castle Rock by 4:00 in the afternoon of that same day. The library staff look lazy and apathetic to that patron.

Fortunately, such is the exception rather than the norm.

Still, when I see how many requests for materials we tend to have every day (a list that includes from 300 to 700 items, averaging closer to 600) versus the number of expired and canceled items (recently averaging 120 a day), it bothers me how many of the items that we process go unused. It comes to around 15% to 20% of the items that we list daily! That's why it takes a full hour to deal with those items every morning.

...Maybe I'm being overly sensitive on this issue, but when that much of a task's time is spent on undoing the work, it seems like a problem. On the one hand, it is job security for the people in my department, but on the other hand it's a little stupid. The technology has made it easy to request items, but some human element makes it easy to ignore those requests. There seems to be an interrupt between the human and machine here, and I don't know what to do about it.