The busiest day for campus retrieval in 2017: 668 requests in 24 hours

March is often our busiest month in Minitex Resource Sharing. For staff responsible for retrieving and processing items at our many campus libraries, it is a daily sprint. On an average day in March our staff search for about 360 requests. However, on Monday, March 20, 2017 there were 668 requests waiting to be printed, retrieved, and processed at campus locations. This was not going to be our normal sprint, but a marathon! In order to maintain our 24-hour turnaround time, staff from other areas of Resource Sharing pitched in.

Resource Sharing has four satellite offices, in addition to Andersen Library, located across the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota: 

• Wilson Library
• Walter Library
• Bio-Medical Library
• Magrath Library (in St. Paul)

There are twenty-three different library collections connected to these four satellite offices. At the campus libraries, staff are responsible for printing, retrieving, and processing the requests. In some libraries, we do this three times a day. The busiest location is Wilson Library where the staff is responsible for retrieving materials from ten collections. On March 20, 2017, over 60%, or about 400 requests, were sent to the Wilson office.  

For the month of March 2017, our campus libraries staff filled 93% of all requests they received. In our Wilson Library office 75% were filled with loans, and in our Bio-Medical Library office, 75% were filled with copies. This is reflective of the types of materials held by these libraries. In addition to working with technology to print, scan, and update requests, the library assistants develop working relationships with subject librarians whose assistance makes it easier to locate obscure or hard-to-find items for our patrons.

We survived and processed the deluge of 668 requests!  Who knows what that tomorrow might bring?