Success beyond our expectations!

Well - we've had Mitcham live for over a month & been a really consortium (i.e. more than 1 library on the system) for 4 weeks yesterday.  We're generally delighted with how things have gone, though there are lessons that we've learned that will inform us in how we will change future roll outs.

What has truly amazed us has been a much greater movement of items between libraries than we had predicted.  What we have seen is an initial surge from the backlog of reservations that had been put on items in local collections prior to each library joining the consortium.  For example, if Marion had 2 copies of a book, and 6 reservations on it, then it would take 3 cycles of lending these 2 items to clear the queue.  However once Marion joined the consortium there may have been 3 copies of this book sitting on shelves.  The Marion reservations immediately went to these 3 copies and the items were shipped to Marion.

The impact of this has been a spectacular amount of movement of items between the initial 4 libraries.  This is evidenced by both the photo below and the statistics from Toll.  They recorded an additional 224 black boxes were moved between the 4 libraries last week!

To accommodate this amount of shipping we have had to make additional deliveries to some libraries.  Below is one of the extra deliveries to Onkaparinga.  It contains 17 additional crates (on top of the usual daily delivery of 5). As you can see they needed a forklift to get it there.

The maximum number of additional boxes delivered to one site in one day has been 20!!

We expect that this initial flurry to occur as each new library comes on board, as there will be their existing holds to be filled.  However, after the initial rush we expect this to slow down.  So, with 4 large metro libraries coming online over the next 4 weeks we expect to see another peak, followed by us beginning to discover what the "new normal" will be.


PLS staff will continue to work with TOLL and the libraries to ensure that we will cope with the next peak, and beyond.  And I'll post a few pictures and information about the volume of books being shifted around over next month or more.