Internship Journal, Week 4: September 18 & 20
29 September 2024
If you're familiar with supply chains and/or retail inventory management (and if I'm reading the cursory web search properly) you've probably heard the terms "just-in-case" and "just-in-time" thrown around before. They are, as they sound, two sides of the same coin:
The goal of just-in-time inventory management is to reduce the use of buffer inventories and to synchronize the movement of materials through the production process so that materials are only delivered just before they are needed. Just-in-case management is the opposite, meaning that large inventories of production materials are held on-site so they are always on hand whenever they are needed (Johnson, 2018, p. 36).
Discussion of these kinds of models in library literature is mainly focused on academic libraries, which makes sense: academic libraries are access points for highly specialized knowledge with a complexity beyond the average person, knowledge that absolutely needs to be vetted for authoritative accuracy than your average public library book. The contents of the collection, then, was the uncontested realm of subject specialists and collection development librarians, and whatever books to be added were planned out ahead of time by measuring what cases or in how many would patrons possibly need them—hence, just-in-case.
Even though public library collections are molded to meet patron needs and wants, they've historically hewed close to the just-in-case model up until recently, presumably thanks to the contractual obligations I've discussed in previous entries and quality assurances from traditional publishers. Once the mass adoption of digital infrastructure shook libraryland up with eBooks and self publishing, and ye olde financial precarity began to tighten its grip on everything, public libraries needed a way to make sure they weren't wasting money by picking up less items in case someone *might* want them, and getting more surefire bets that were definitely what patrons wanted. And what better way to know what patrons want than just letting them tell you themselves?
This is a very long-winded way of providing context for patron-driven acquisitions, the primary collection development model of public libraries today. CRRL's acquisitions continue to be driven by traditional publisher output and/or accessibility through the usual vendors, but as the Prince demonstrated for me on Wednesday, materials suggested by patrons now make up an significant portion of new additions to the (adult) collection.
As Rubin and Rubin (2020, p. 234) gesture towards, patron-driven acquisitions are almost exclusively facilitated through a form CRRL's Bibliocommons OPAC, where it's called Suggest-a-Purchase (SAP), usable by any patron with a library barcode. At minimum, patrons must provide a wanted item's name, the author (or in the case of movies, a performer or director), the year it was published, the requested format, and what audience they believe the item is intended for. (This is usually obvious, but as the Prince has emphasized while going through my carts, publisher specification and story content can run up against system standards or noisy patron sensibilities).
All useful for pinning down the right item to order, but not nearly as straightforward or sensitive as the other two fields: the ISBN, and any extra notes. Any patron who submits an ISBN is liable to become a favorite, as it it can save a lot of time trying to find an item that isn't widely publicized and/or SEOed to appear at the top of web searches. Specifically searching by ISBN is nigh-guaranteed to retrieve the item it's attached to, in whatever specific format if there's multiple to boot; so a selector can just copy the ISBN, paste it into the vendor search bar, and immediately see most of the relevant information they need to make their decision. Of course, the significance of the ISBN eludes most, so the field remains tragically underfilled by the average patron.
The extra notes, meanwhile, can possibly be incredibly sensitive. In Bibliocommons, every patron suggestion is submitted with their name attached—which is may provide an identifier to whatever they've included in the notes field. From what the Prince showed me, most patrons either leave it empty, or helpfully include a pasted description of the book that'll also be present on the Ingram listing. It should be noted once again, that the Prince is the selector for juvenile materials. Adult items, requested by people with a baseline level of literacy to make coherent cases for things, are liable to have all kinds of messages included in their suggestions: notifications that the library is missing an item from a series, impassioned pleas to purchase a favorite, or even speech that veers into dogwhistles, or worse—so one can only imagine what can be divulged when someone is suggesting controversial material.1 Suffice to say, this is one of the perhaps elusive conundrums of confidentiality that organizations so often caution new professionals of, so any and all personal judgements about a patron's suggestion or their notes are not to be publicized, if they somehow manage to leave the computer screen they were beheld on.
Nonetheless, as with any other purchase, due diligence must be done: looking up the suggested item in question, seeing if it can be acquired from the proper channels, checking selection aids, et cetera, et cetera. Availability usually ends up as the primary issue with suggestions—items that will actually be approved are limited to those published in the last two years, but even then, titles that only achieve midlist obscurity and seemingly most nonfiction can be hard to get through vendors once their initial printing dries up. In some lucky cases, though, an unobtainable item will lead to further development on a topic. If I remember correctly, the teen librarian at my branch of work made an incredibly specific request—juvenile nonfiction about Napoleon's place in American history outside of the Louisiana Purchase—and while the suggested title was out of print, the Prince deemed that specific niche worthy of searching for anything else that might fill it.
If an item is approved, then the Prince will respond to the patron's suggestion with an approval message, plus an estimate of when said item will available in Bibliocommons, then place said item into a collection gaps cart. This is different from the carts that are used for items that have hit hold ratios that are tracked by Horizon, as while a patron does have a demonstrable need for an item, the need isn't as urgent as already-present items that have a growing number of holds that warrant more copies.
Really, that regard might as well be reflected with how restricted the SAP system is now. When I first joined CRRL two years ago, one had a lot more opportunities to ask, with every patron able to suggest up to five titles each month; but at some point early into my tenure, that number was reduced to just two. And just recently, an extra message was added to the submission form that asks that patrons wait on suggesting new items until 30 days of their publication date. As much as patrons are directly shaping the collection today, circumstances are making it difficult for them to have as much of a say.
After those, we moved up in time to the items that are just arriving in the system, specifically those that a lot of people presumably want: the Hot New Picks. For such a name, there really isn't anything hot about 'em—just a Bibliocommons list of some of the new releases that are hitting the system on a given week. These lists aren't separated by age group, which means that the bright, cartoony covers of juvenile books get to cozy up with their edgy teenage YA books and sophisticated, abstract adult books. Unlike their elders, which are entirely dictated by popularity demonstrated through dozens-long hold lists, the target audiences' reduced access to technology and/or indifference to library books means that youth books have less of a spotlight. Which...still means that a given item's inclusion is dictated by popularity, more than I would like, but with a bit more leeway to include stuff off the beaten path.
Since Bibliocommons automatically generates a collage of the first nine book covers as a cover image for each list, and the deluge of adult books each week leaving youth books with only the bottom three slots, placement does have more visible considerations. On most lists, those slots will be comprised of one picture book, one juvenile book whether fiction or nonfiction, and one YA book, almost certainly fiction. As they're made a month in advance, nothing is necessarily final, but given the pestering simplicity of this task among a bunch of others, I'd imagine they're a "do it and forget it 'till it's time" deal.
Before I returned to the great dead juvie weed, the Prince introduced me to content calendars, which is just a fancy name for themed lists. Over a given month, a quartet of lists are put up on CRRL's Bibliocommons and OverDrive frontends based around whatever topic or holiday that identifies what time of year it is, made entirely of items that are already in the system. Sounds simple, but the standards for OverDrive lists are considerably bigger: they're usually made of around 25~30 items minimum, will have some pithy phrase to go with the theme, and depending on if it'll take the top banner or not, will also have to have a background graphic to go with it. Perhaps not too difficult individually—but again, there are 3 of these each month, and will probably involve sifting through a lot of subject headings that may or may not lead to other suitable titles. I, of course, will be making one of these, for a topic that I have completely managed to forget, though that won't be until sometime next month.
With the Prince gone with the Captain to an awards committee, Friday turned towards the daily minutiae of the sub-departments in Collection Services, organized by the Prince's presumed partner-in-crime, the adult selector. Given that these are considered their own departments due to the sheer amount of things each handles, and given my week-overdue completion of this journal, I'm going to be grasping for hazy memories that'll make for some spotty recollections.
First up, was interlibrary loans, the domain of the Crafter and the Dame. The Dame wasn't in that day either, so my walkthrough was left to the Crafter. Interlibrary loans, a longtime service staple across all kinds of libraries, are just as if one library system was a patron borrowing from another library library systems themselves, sorta. Since public libraries are mandated to stay current with what the most people want to read at any given time, patrons with with older or academic or more genre-specific tastes such as myself can find themselves seemingly overlooked. Instead of consoling a patron's frustrations with daydreams of purchases that will never be made, they can be pointed to the interlibrary loan form, which is more or less the time-inverse cousin of the Suggest-a-Purchase form.
After the form is filled and submitted, the request is automatically sent to CRRL's ILL cache. All ILLs are handled through the gargantuan network of OCLC's WorldShare platform, so as long as a patron has filled in the form properly and/or included the right ISBN, WorldShare can usually pinpoint the exact item and format without an issue. Once an item is found, libraries that actually have said item need to be located—and after that is located, the final conditional is a library willing to send us the item. If all three boxes are checked, then the owning library will ship it off in the mail, through one of a handful of ILL distributors with individual concerns that I can't recall, but regardless, the (non-staff) patron that ordered the book will have to pay the $5 postage fee.2 However long a patron will have with an item is up to the lending library, including whether it can be renewed or not, but patron due dates are specifically set so that the item will be sent back about a week before the actual library wants the item to get back to them. Requesting ILLs isn't that of a complex process, but it is one that takes a lot of care from both librarian and patron, not least because we're trusted with items that belong to an entirely different owner, often items that aren't easy to find.
The care involved when an ILL actually gets here, though, is when things can feel disproportionately complex. At least, I found it so, since the as-of-yet unfamiliar interface for keeping records aside, there might be more sleight of hand involved than any other conventional activity I've ever seen in a public library? Each ILL that the department receives has its own sort of ticket in WorldShare, with record documents that have to be printed out and labeled and important information noted and highlighted and organized, along with a yellow slip and barcode that have to be attached to the item alongside and/or covering whatever attachments the lending library includes with their own outgoing items. And since the aforementioned care involves leaving not a trace of our tampering on the item, coupled with the smallest and inconvenient of loaned items can be anywhere from DVD cases to mass market paperbacks, those documents have to be cut and taped in some pretty precise ways to stuff everything inside.
Naturally, the Crafter was a virtuoso in her demonstration of this process, accurately estimating how much can be removed from a given sheet and cutting and folding and taping the required attachments almost effortlessly, like the daily grind it is. Myself, as one who has not engaged in any visually artistic pursuits in too long and typically opens envelopes and packages with a frenetic carelessness for what might happen to the container and even contents at times, struggled. Once everything is properly fitted onto the item, it gets sent off to the destination branch to meet the patron awaiting with bated breath.
Head spinning, my next visit was to the processing department, province of Arcadia and the Processing Pauper, where all the new items that have just arrived are prepared to be released to hordes of hold-holders...or where the endlessly accumulating piles of problem items languish until someone can finally get to them. New items, if they've been ordered from the right warehouses, will have already been jacketed and barcoded, which leaves only getting them properly stickered and received, or essentially registered, in Horizon.
Arcadia was the one who walked me through the latter: despite being acquired in different orders, carts of items will generally arrive in large shipments at once. With a collected cart of orders and a sheaf of invoice papers, one has to pick a new item to be processed, leaf through the invoices to find the respective order, pinpoint the item listing, then scan the requisite number of attached barcode to record their receipt. Nothing particularly difficult with most of the steps already done for us. If an item isn't already barcoded, like DVDs, then someone has to attach a barcode to it—also not particularly difficult, since barcode stickers are preemptively printed out in bulk and lying around everywhere. DVDs and other A/V discs, however, also need to have those barcode numbers printed out on a specific circle-sticker-printer-thing and then slapped on every single disc in a single item, and that takes a comparable amount of practiced finesse as ILL items to make it just as annoying.
If the occasional processing of A/V items is annoying, then a job that involves a lot of dealing with A/V items is probably prone to constantly cause frustration-induced headaches—which is pretty much the position of the Pauper. Scratched discs, cracked DVD or audiobook cases, broken Launchpad chargers, whatever, they all find their way to her slate. She takes it all well enough; which follows, considering her last role was a page, that obscure and perpetually underappreciated position, at my branch of work. Also among the Pauper's duties are the last batch of processing that an item gets before shipping out, attaching genre or age group or seasonal NEW stickers, and pull lists, which I've had more than enough experience with both at CRRL and the last public library system I worked at.
I call all those aforementioned duties head-spinning and annoying, but neither of those departments involve a machine language that well and truly will make unacquainteds' head hurt, and that department was the last: cataloging. Cataloging is something I had gotten exposure to through LIBS 677 back in the spring, but given the likely logistical nightmare of setting up a mock ILS that students scattered around the country could muddle around with, it's remained something that I never got even theoretical experience with. Oh Hi MARC, presumably the lead cataloger at CRRL by her job title, was gracious enough to let me type up the proper entries for one (1) record, but otherwise walked me through the nigh-dozens of kinds of items that have to be properly classified in the system.
For the sake of simplicity and remaining attention of anyone that made it this far down, I'll keep things brief, but for each and every item that the system lends out through most mediums or even just keeps tabs on, there's a respective record stored in Horizon. This includes physical books, audiobook CDs, DVDs, digital versions of these from OverDrive or Kanopy, Library of Things items, law library materials, LinkedIn Learning courses, those buggy EBSCOhost database books, and probably more obscure formats I've forgotten.
Physical books generally have the most detailed records in the system, with MARC fields filled out and multiple entries and ISBNs attached to them. Most of these are copied from OCLC's database, formatted through MarcEdit, then imported into Horizon. Other formats from the outside vendors are copied and imported as well, but naturally, don't have as much metadata, or can't be managed through Horizon (or, in the case of hoopla, simply aren't recorded in the system at all due to the tens of thousands of possible items that would flood out everything else). Of course, since we're bringing in metadata from outside sources, it's common for some of them to be too complex, or even filled with incorrect information like subject headings in an entirely different language, or otherwise just not sufficient for CRRL's cataloging standards, so the grind comes from scanning through each MARC entry and bringing them up to par.
As what specific code or status or holiday has to be recorded and noted on slips for the processors to follow, the cataloging work for new materials is actually done in the middle of the process, before Arcadia and the Pauper have their turn at them. In a presentation to the rest of the system a year ago, the Prince likened the journey an item undergoes as a river flowing into an ocean—and if you've read through everything, you'll understand how winding the current carrying materials can be at any collections department, even if it looks different from what I've described.
1 ^This is largely just conjecture from me, of course, but again, given that one ""side"" of the political sphere has fully capitulated to/deliberately weaponized the paranoia of its base to the point that libraries' operations are affected by it, it's not hard to think it would seep down into what should be innocuous transactions.
2 ^Unless they come from the local Mary Washington University, which could literally just walk to deliver their ILLs when my branch of work was the system's central office.
References
Johnson, P. (2018). Fundamentals of collection development and management. American Library Association.
Rubin, R. E., & Rubin, R. G. (2020). Foundations of library and information science. American Library Association.