About 20-25 years ago a ‘new’ system for library material management started to catch on.
It isn’t used everywhere, but Cobb County
Traditionally library branches ‘owned’ the books on their shelves. If a book was taken out at branch A and later returned to branch B it would be shipped back to the owning branch A.
Using the 'owned system' took time and effort in repositioning the books/materials to their original libraries and kept them out of circulation for a few extra days and required shipping them between branches. The 'floating' system was devised which it was felt reduced the necessity for this endless interchange between libraries. It was believed that the new floating system reduced overhead and made it possible to reduce the number of the same items being purchased. Under this floating system materials taken out at branch A are returned to any branch and retained there. No branch ‘owns’ the material. It just floats through the system.
I prefer to refer to this as the ‘aimlessly drifting system’. Think of a book as a log drifting down a river, eventually these logs (books) tend to pile up on sandbars, our sandbars are the Main library and 3 Regional libraries.
Over time the books leaving the local branches tend to pile up on the sandbars of the system (think logjam). This is why West Regional ends up with 11 copies of the Robb book ‘Salvation in Death’ and Kennesaw Downtown has 0. Or why you can see below on my list of 13 titles that West Regional has between 6 and 11 copies of the same title and Kennesaw Downtown has 0 copies of these books. In the worst example, the Kellerman ‘Evidence’ had 17 copies at West Regional with only 1 at Kennesaw.
When our Main or Regional libraries get such great quantities of the same titles piled up on their shelves they need to exercise some common sense and rather than stack them up on the shelves or in a store room they should take the excess books off their own shelves and send them out to the branch libraries that they serve. A quote from the above mentioned Library Journal: “If too many copies accumulate at a branch at Gwinnett, staff simply toss them into bins for delivery to other locations.”
No library needs 8-18 copies of the same title on its shelves. Can we now have some common sense applied and get these overages of books off the Main/Regional shelves and out to the branch libraries?
