MLA 2014: Tech Services Time Travel

Mark K. Ehlert, Minitex/DCME I attended the Wednesday afternoon session “Tech Services Time Travel” led by Lori Veldhuis (Dakota County Library) and Rebecca Ganzel (Augsburg College). The themes for the session centered on timeliness and efficiency. Rebecca outlined how she arrived at her new position to find a significant backlog of materials waiting for her—some 2800 items. Using a combination of workflow checklists, stats-crunching spreadsheets, and logistical reorganization (e.g., naming carts), she and her students cut that backlog in half over the course of a single year while steadily managing the flow of new acquisitions. Lori recounted Dakota County’s 2006 process improvement initiative. Officials attended library staff at the county’s nine branch libraries to calculate the time staff spent performing various tasks (even going so far as to use stopwatches!). By 2012 most library branches had met their goals, but one part of the initiative remained unfinished: a measurement process to monitor compliance. This led to a time study. Yellow paper flags, serving as log sheets for statistics, were inserted in various materials to track their way through the technical services pipeline—from receipt to cataloging to processing. Staff engaged in the process by drawing up step-by-step documentation and entering data into spreadsheets. In the end, the time study turned into a successful assessment tool to measure average workflow timings for incoming library materials.