Aiming To Move Materials Faster, Brooklyn Public Library Chooses UPS
Norman Oder -- Library Journal, 10/24/2008
- In-house system led to large backlogs
- UPS does it overnight
- Increased cost, says library, pays off in circ
While numerous library consortia use commercial couriers like UPS for interlibrary loan, the Brooklyn Public Library may be the first library in the country to use UPS, rather than a local or internal courier system, to move materials around its branches.
BPL’s internal delivery system, which used six trucks and dedicated staff, frequently got backed up, Natalie Caruso, Library Circulation Leader, told LJ. Turnaround time was at best three days, given that materials all went back to the Central Library; it frequently reached seven days, if materials were not picked up in the morning and/or were mishandled in the tight workspace, and could take up to two weeks.
Caruso estimated that ten percent of materials would be misplaced, and backlogs caused by winter weather and the holidays sometimes led to six-week delays. “We had clear vision of our loading dock maybe two months out of the year,” she said.
The UPS change
No longer. On May 1, the library began a three-month pilot with UPS, which assigned a different truck to each of BPL’s 60 branches. “The results were astounding,” Caruso said. “We’re able to get material into the hands of the patron in 24 hours.” Now BPL receives only 100 to 120 boxes at Central—the location’s holdings— rather than 500, since UPS, which takes library packages to its sorting facility, delivers them the next day to the assigned location. Staffers who formerly drove trucks and sorted materials now work as sorters full-time.
“To my knowledge no one else” uses an overnight commercial system, Valerie Horton told LJ. She is executive director of CLiC, the Colorado Library Consortium, which hosts the Moving Mountains Project’s Clearinghouse of Resources on Physical Delivery of Materials. “There are many systems that use regional carriers to do internal delivery. But I had never heard of an overnight carrier doing internal delivery before I talked to Brooklyn.” (Here’s a presentation she did on the varieties of courier service.)
Growing circ
While BPL wouldn’t provide specific numbers, “we spend less to use UPS for this level/amount of delivery than we would if we ran it ourselves,” spokeswoman Stefanie Arck told LJ. “We have aggressive circulation goals (19 million by next year) so getting these materials to our customer in a timely manner is key for us and UPS can deliver that.” BPL, which formerly limited users to five holds per card, now allows ten.
One criticism about commercial courier systems is that the packaging can be wasteful. BPL uses canvas bags and plastic totes specially designed for library use. At the Moving Mountains symposium in September on library courier service, Caruso said representatives of some other large urban libraries were “very, very interested,” because local vendors generally can’t dedicate specific times or a whole truck to the library.
