Floating Collections

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Floating Collections

• How to increase issues, save money on couriers
  and refresh your collections

Presented by Louise LaHatte - from Auckland City
Libraries and the eLGAR consortium - November 2005
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Contents

• What is a floating collection?
• Why float?
• Making it easy for staff
• Experience of Auckland City Libraries

• How to set up floating
• Where eLGAR is taking it next
• What would make it even better
• Contacts

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Book is checked in at Mt Roskill. Location in
item record changes to akl (Mt Roskill large
print)
Customer returns book to Mt Roskill
Large print book with location aal (Avondale
large print) is borrowed at Avondale
Book stays at Mt Roskill until borrowed again
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Why do it?

• For public libraries the benefits are quite
  clear. Floating all or part of your collections
  
• can make your collection more available to your
  customers
• can save money
• can save staff time

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Advantages

• Customers are able to choose from fresh and
  ever-changing stock
• Smaller sites reduce the risk of being read out
• Ensures that items are immediately available to
  customers when they are checked in
• Collections move where customers want them
• Can reduce the need to duplicate titles across
  many sites
• There are opportunities for greater use of
  standing orders when items do not need to be
  purchased for specific sites

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More Advantages

• Avoids extra transactions (double checkin at
  returning location and home location)
• Less staff administration than rotating
  collections function
• Reduces transportation costs of moving items
  between sites
• Processing of items can be reduced (no site
  labels)
• Reduces manual handling of books by staff
• Gives us the ability to monitor customer
  borrowing patterns

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Issues

• Some branches complain that other sites books
  are in worse condition and they are getting all
  the old ones! (Mitigation agreed weeding
  standards and thorough weed before floating)
• Smaller sites may end up with too much stock on
  their shelves (Mitigation agreed guidelines for
  redistribution eg arrangement with larger site
  to periodically send excess to them)
• Customers may expect the same book to be
  available again at their site ( Mitigation
  ability to reserve books from other sites,
  selling the advantage of access to more titles)

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Making it easy for staff

• it is easy! staff dont have to do anything
  extra to make each transaction work, and they are
  doing far less transactions and manual handling
• promote the benefits to customers particularly
  those using small sites
• have a staggered program of introducing new
  floating collections
• have easy to use tools for weeding and responding
  to stock fluctuations

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3 hits and youre out!
TOTAL UP ALL POINTS If you have 3 or more points
allocated to any book, consider it for
withdrawal, unless one of the following is true
the person is a NZ-er, Maori, Pacific Islander,
known in your local area, completely unknown to
you.If one of the above is true, send the item
into Central for assessment.
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ACL experience

• Collections floating now
• Large print
• Audio books
• Childrens Picture books
• Romance fiction
• Teen fiction
• Biographies

• Everything in these collections is floating
  between
• all 17 sites,
• excluding the Central Library
• basement (back catalogue)
• mobile library

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ACL Volume

• Of the 133,901 items floating at the time
• 212,250 items floated to a new location in the
  year from July 2004 to June 2005
• 23,538 items on average per month (active months
  only) floated to a new location

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How do I get started?

• Setting up the Floating Determiner Table
• How will your location codes item types affect
  floating?
• Set up exceptions - excluding locations or item
  types
• Use global or rapid update to make sure your
  desired items have the right codes to float (and
  loan rules still work)
• Using the variable length field for owning
  location

• What collections and formats do you choose to
  float?
• How are your sites grouped and used should you
  float to all sites or smaller group?
• What is the condition of the stock you want to
  float is it consistent across sites?
• Do you need to introduce condition weeding
  standards?
• What guidelines and business rules do you need to
  establish for dealing with overflow or loss?

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Location codes
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Item types
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Truncation Wildcards

• In the item and terminal location fields the
  following characters can be used
• The '' character matches all characters to the
  end of the code field. For example, mn matches
  mnnew, mnpho, mnref, etc.
• This is great!
• The '?' character is supposed to match any single
  character in the location code. For example,
  m?ref should match mdref, mnref, mpref, etc.
  Similarly, m?re? should match mdref, mdres,
  mnref, mnres, etc. Be warned this
  does not work!

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elGAR table
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Where eLGAR is taking it next

• Each library is unique and may use it in
  different ways
• Proximity of branches and patterns of customer
  cross-use vary considerably

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Where eLGAR is taking it next

• Auckland City
• Extend number of collections floated to all sites
  considerably, but in a phased approach
• Likely to be first Chinese books, popular
  fiction and non-fiction, childrens fiction and
  easy to read
• Probable exclusions magazines, other languages,
  DVDs (case kept behind desk), sheet music, Maori
  and NZ material, Mobile Library, basement
  collections
• Any collections to be floated will have weeding
  and management guidelines sent to sites first and
  a BIG WEED will happen!

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Where eLGAR is taking it next

• North Shore City
• Float all lending collections except magazines
  LOTE to all sites except mobile library

• Manukau City
• Float between clusters of libraries in geographic
  proximity with similar collections and customer
  groups (3 in Eastern group and 3 in Mangere group)

• Rodney District
• Still reviewing patterns of customer use as
  libraries geographically distant

• Waitakere City
• No immediate plans to float

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What would make it even better1

• Statistics we would like to see
• Number of items adopted and ceded at each location

E.g. Floating transactions for November 2005
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What would make it even better2

• Wildcard as well as truncation in the table
• Because then we could do variations like
• ae floats to a to catch all our adult literacy
  collection, which have two different item types
  (adult reader, or kitset) and we dont want all
  kitsets to float

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Contacts

• Louise LaHatte
• elGAR Collections Coordinator
• Louise.lahatte_at_aucklandcity.govt.nz
• Ann Ryan
• eLGAR Business team Manager
• Ann.ryan_at_aucklandcity.govt.nz
• Gill Pannell
• eLGAR Circulation Coordinator
• Gpannell_at_manukau.govt.nz

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Any questions about floating?