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SITE VISIT: NYPL LIBRARY SERVICES CENTER, BOOKOPS (5/14)
- BookOps is shared technical services between NYPL & Brooklyn PL, with focus on circulating material
- Expect annual savings of $3M - $3.5M that NYPL will devote to other strategic initiatives; total budget was $14.3M / year
- Process approximately 2M items / year
- Hired Booz-Allen as planning consultant (not a library consultant)
- NYPL was already very efficient and had excess capacity
- Went live on May 6th: BPL staff moved to LSC; most staff already knew each other from one context or another
- Hired a project manager to implement plan (a one-year temp; hired someone w/ experience in military logistics); he was so good they hired him to do logistics for LSC
- Like RECAP, named one of the partners as the single host (NYPL)
- Staff involved pre-implementation
- Morphed from steering committee to planning committee to implementation committee
- So far, focus is on co-location (they’re in one place), not co-engineering (standardization); no mandated timeline on co-engineering – need funding (e.g. for shared LMS)
- Impressive sorting machine that reads barcodes on completely processed material and distributes by library & call number range; used for branch material (not “research” material) only
- Did pay some attention to minimizing impact on staff identity
- Needed to negotiate with two unions to allow for cross-institutional reporting
- BPL staff “became employees of NYPL”
- NYPL and BPL IT have been working together to provide support; DBM at LSC does record loading and some scripting
- Queens PL was part of original plan, but opted out and decided simply to implement additional best practices
- NYPL has 90 branches and BPL has 60 branches, and they sometimes order multiple copies for some branches
- [Some gains specific to co-location and public library issues and workflows]
- Will send us electronic versions of PPT and handouts
- Stressed importance for them of implementing a shared LMS; also, pay attention to effects on staff
- Discovered that support systems need to work together (accounting, HR, etc.); assumptions were that legal and financial issues would be easier to address than they were
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