Claimed Returned and the Double Check-in
On a topic somewhat related to Nat Wu's post, I did a report for my operations management class in Fall '02 about claimed returneds and how their excessive use is causing chronic waste of library materials. Based on staff interviews and some mathematical extrapolation, I conservatively concluded that $40,000 is wasted by just setting things to claimed returned.
Now, I know that there is the issue of things that don't get checked in and really were returned. We have our controversial "double check in" here at VY, which does cause extra work for the librarians and SLAs, but it catches plenty of mistakes. I've been keeping detailed statistics on what mistakes are made since November 2003. Our rate of mistakes has remained steady at about one per 2.66 carts--I computed a random cart to be about 225 books. That means that for an item to be scanned and missed by two people, the odds against this are conservatively 1/50,625 and, less confidently 1/358,000. Either way you slice it, it certainly makes it easy to rule out the "I already returned this" scenario.
I don't know if any of you are familiar with the Six Sigma quality assurance metrics, but we are 99.9985% accurate with double check-in (about a sigma level 3.5), which is pretty damn good for an unautomated system.
I don't know if strategic thinking has ever been a part of the library's plan, but if we really want to ramp up or collection rate, I think we have to increase our successful check-in rate to an unimpeachable level.
posted by Anonymous at 2:38 PM
10 Comments:
Yes, Daniel, that is a great point. Unfortunately there is no way to do that here at Central and keep the work flow going. We don't have enough available check-in stations, which would require the requisitioning of more computers and scanners. If someone could think of a way to redesign the workflow so that we could actually accomplish that, I'd be quite happy.
As to my other point, my feeling is that regardless of error on our side, we do too little to stop the loss of materials as it is. For example, Central has gates on only one side of ck/out, but people come in and leave both ways. East has no gates at all, and NW similarly has gates only on one side. Also, we have a very lax policy on temp cards, which are a big problem. Wait, I think this should be another post.
3:32 PM
What??? I can't believe you all are actually posting about library business on the library business blog. What has this world come to??
7:24 PM
On the balance, I really don't think we could implement double check-in here at Central. It's just too time consuming. If you don't care that your turnaround time for books grows longer than 48 hours max or that your back room becomes crammed with carts, it's ok. However, it is one of our standards to get items shelved as soon as possible and I think that's a standard we need to maintain while assuring quality control at check-in. Chris suggested a "double scan-in" for individual items rather than going through the whole cart once and then going through the whole cart a second time. It seems to me that this would take up a good deal less time and achieve the same results.
3:13 PM
Well, I can promise you that if somebody over on the IPL side had actually decided to take some of the equipment that was purchased by IPL at NL, it would speed up the process a hell of a lot more quickly. I'm not sure anyone at IPL ever realized how much faster we checked in things then you guys at Central did simply by having the scanning and the magnetizing taking place all at once. Plus the fact that you've really got to be a moron to not check something in using the check-in machines; they're very nearly flawless. We rean into problems only where people would subvert the process by sticking stuff on the wrong carts. So, if somebody had decided to purchase even one of those stations like they said they were going to and xfer it over to Central, it would not only decrease your error rate, but if would speed up the process, even if you still only wanted to do one check-in.
10:22 PM
As far as discipline is concerned, if, as I wish, we restructured check-in so that there is a person dedicated to doing it, unlike our present system of having the same person answer the phone, take payments, and handle problems, you wouldn't have a problem with the shelvers not doing the double-scan. We don't have the time as it is to do either system, whereas the double-cart scanning (as opposed to the double-item scanning) takes more time whether you're busy with something else or not. At Central, we don't have anyone but circ staff checking items in. With minimal enforcement we could get our shelvers and other staff to do it properly. If discipline were a problem in our department we wouldn't be able to trust people to do anything, but we do and it works. Therefore I'm not really concerned about that.
Valley Ranch may work in a certain way, but to be honest with you I have to say people from another location who work there really don't feel that it's doing that well. I've seen it a couple of times and whatever the problem, I would not want to risk our circ. procedures causing us to slow down to that point.
As to the machines, I can also say I witnessed them in operation at NL and they seemed to work extremely well. Of course they would just from the fact that they're a lot (A LOT) newer than our equipment. I wasn't joking when I said CBryan told us how the equipment is failing. The scanners supposedly have a life of 3 years but we have some going on 10, and they're not going strong.
10:04 AM
I don't know the specifics, I've just heard that the place is disorderly and disorganized. I wouldn't make any general assumptions, but I've heard it more than once from different people, as well as having been in there at least once myself not too long ago. The shelves did not look so good at that point. Of course things change over time and any particular day can be pretty bad in an otherwise functional establishment so I didn't assume that was the usual state of things.
But I do recall one thing, and that is that Kathy got griped at and supposedly reprimanded for moving a desensitizer block.
11:56 AM
Kathy has a bad problem of griping, but that's far less than worthy of a reprimand. Nothing in there shows her to be any different from your average old-lady employee.
I make no judgement on why VY is in the state it is in. All I know is that the state of disorder it is in should not be acceptable to anyone.
Also, on the subject of all those NL books, your librarians created that mess for themselves. All of those could have been put in storage and processed in the coming years for inclusion in the new VY building, but instead your librarians decided they needed to pre-approve of anything added to the collection, instead of letting them be stored and added later and refusing items they didn't want then. There's still a ton of stuff for the ladies upstairs to get through, and even when the ladies at VY decide what stuff they want when, all of that will go on the back end of what's being processed now, so it's doubly a waste of time. Not to mention that because of this silly decision the actual items that are supposed to be being processed in are taking forever. VY has had items in Staff Review for months that should have been processed long ago.
I guess there's not enough of you shelvers to take care of what you need to, but your SLAs and librarians are just causing themselves to have problems.
2:10 PM
I'm not saying the stuff doesn't need to be reviewed, I'm saying it doesn't need to be reviewed right now. You guys need to make sure your library is running, first and foremost at peak efficiency. If they can do that and check over all that stuff, more power to them. However, 55 boxes of books is no laughing matter in terms of time consumption. I assure you, if I was over there all the work would be done in a timely manner and well done at that. I haven't yet had a job I couldn't whip into shape. I'm not saying your people can't achieve what needs to be done, just that they're not at the moment.
2:50 PM
First of all, I made one gaping error when I mentioned that should have taken those machines. I neglected to consider the fact that they only work well with the RFID tags. If you're using tagged items, they're wonderful. If not, they're less effective I think then even a regular scanner/de-magnetizer combo. IPL of course will certainly not spend the money to upgrade to tagging the entire collection anytime soon, so unfortunatately the stations and the scanners would just go to waste even if they had all of them.
As for this VY/Central inter-service rivalry thing you guys have going on...first of all, VY cannot be as disorganized as some people think it is unless they just drove it off a cliff in the time I've been gone. I don't think that's likely considering it's being managed by essentially the same people. And I think focusing on VY as compared to Central is unfair; I have always thought that VY was neat and relatively orderly compared to Central, where the focus seems to be "stack 'em and shelve 'em", because of the volume of material coming in. VY's volume is necessarily lower, so they can afford to be more discriminating about how and when they go about shelving things. And in the instances when I was working there and someone asked for something that wasn't on the shelves, it was usually found in a matter of moments, and didn't require perusing multiple carts and shelves to find as it does at Central, so it wasn't as big of a deal to let things sit a little longer.
Also, just based on the way Daniel tells the story, I'd sit Kathy down for a chat too. I'm pretty sure if I had come over to Central on my Sunday and dissed the library like she did, my sup at NL would have gotten an email the next day(well, that did happen-a couple of times-but not for that reason!)
9:39 PM
You know, I was kind of wondering what you guys were doing with the equipment when it was all meant to work with RFID. It doesn't really make sense to me to try to use it with our system. I was looking at a blurb in that American Libraries magazine. They say RFID is the way of the future, and I say if that's the truth, hallelujah.
As for whether VY or Central is worse, I can only say that from the brief time I spent at VY and the little bit of perusing I did in the shelves, it did not look as good as NW, but better than EB when they didn't have a shelver. As for Central, our shelves aren't really all that bad when we have full staff. It gets bad sometimes, but I haven't even been in non-fic since I've worked here, and I've never gone through to see how well we're doing in any of the other sections either, so I can't really offer an opinion.
5:11 PM
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