[Publib] Displaying Reserved Items

[Mary Beth Revels]

Tom:

We instituted self-service holds at one of our four branches simply
for space reasons.  They ran out of space for holds behind the desk.

It's working well at that branch but we don't have plans currently to
to implement self-service holds at the other three.

Mary Beth Revels, Director
St. Joseph (MO) Public Library

Message: 14
Date: Tue, 4 Aug 2009 15:49:53 -0500
From: "Tom Cooper" <tcooper at wgpl.org>
Subject: RE: [Publib] Displaying Reserved Items
To: "Mary Soucie" <leftylibrarian at gmail.com>,   "Natalie Morgan"
        <morgan at boernelibrary.org>
Cc: publib at webjunction.org

This is a discussion that has interested me for some time. I'd like to
know what, exactly, is the purpose of self checkout of reserves. As I
see it, there is nothing gained in terms of service: indeed, you take
away the service of circulation staff retrieving the reserved items for
the patron, in favor of patrons getting them themselves. And, since so
much paperwork must be instituted to maintain privacy, I can't imagine
there is any savings in actual staff time spent on reserves. As long as
I'm going to be paying staff, I think I'd rather have them interacting
with patrons than spending hours wrapping books in paper slips and
writing names on them. I think that busy libraries first instituted self
checkout of reserves as a way of saving staff time, but once they began
to deal with the privacy issues, the staff time savings evaporated. Or
am I seeing this wrong? Is there truly a different and very good reason
for making patrons retrieve their own reserved items?

Tom Cooper, Director
Webster Groves Public Library
301 E. Lockwood Avenue
Webster Groves, MO 63119-3102

(314) 961-3784
tcooper at wgpl.org

Do not judge beliefs by their plausibility, but by the harm they may do.

                                             Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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