Navigating The Library’s Closed Stacks With A Smartphone

Posted: 02-12-2014 Topics: Annual Conference

Eva Dahlbäck (@KreativaEva) is Librarian and Acting Head of Customer Services at Stockholm University Library. In this guest post, she explains how Stockholm University Library recently developed the Viola system to collect books more efficiently from the closed stacks. Eva also presented about Viola at LIBER 2014, and her talk was the most highly rated of all parallel sessions at the conference.

A few years ago, Stockholm University Library realised that they needed to rethink how they collected books from the closed stacks, for both local orders and interlibrary loan.

As in many other large libraries, a large part of our collections were in closed stacks and books had to be requested by patrons. Each day, the staff handled several hundred orders. The orders were printed on pieces of paper, then sorted and picked up.

Almost 10 people a day worked to collect the books.

We decided to improve our system, so we looked at the process and realised that there was a way to combine the different types of orders. That led to the development of a web-based system named Viola, which now makes it much easier for us to collect books.

Viola sorts all of our orders – from both closed stacks and inter-library loans – and mixes and sorts them into a single digital list.

How It Works

When a patron or another library places an order in our OPAC (Online Public Access Catalogue) or an ILL-system, the orders are collected in a database and sorted by Viola into a single list. From that list, the librarian sits down at their computer to select the orders he or she wants to collect that day.Before we introduced Viola, Stockholm University Library wasn’t a top choice for other libraries for interlibrary loans. It took a long time before the books were sent from the library – sometimes weeks! Now we can collect the book in 24 hours and send them to the customer on the same or next day.

The chosen orders are downloaded as a file to a smartphone. The information in the phone contains all the data needed to find the book. The smartphone can read the barcode or RFID-tag in the book and save that information.

When all the books in the list are gathered, the librarian transfers the list of orders back to their computer and to the Viola-system. Viola automatically updates the library system and changes the status of the book to lent or reserved.

Viola also sends an email to the patron stating that the material is available for pick up. The librarian can simply put the material on the shelf for collection.

There are many benefits with this system:

  • Five people can do the work that 10 did before.
  • Books are collected in half the time that it took under the previous system.
  • The single workflow is easy and makes the job of collecting books more enjoyable.
  • It’s transparent. The system can be accessed from any computer in the library, which means librarians at the information desk can follow the order and give an updated and correct answer to the patrons.
  • Our staff are now more tech savvy. Making this task digital created interest in the task of collecting books. Now everyone knows how to operate the smartphone and printer to use the system and overall staff are more secure using digital equipment.
  • Viola is connected to the invoice-system and the billing department gets a PDF invoice to send.
  • All of our customers – libraries and individual patrons – are more satisfied.

Before we introduced Viola, Stockholm University Library wasn’t a top choice for other libraries for interlibrary loans. It took a long time before the books were sent from the library – sometimes weeks! Now we can collect the book in 24 hours and send them to the customer on the same or next day.

Our local patrons get an email directly from Viola, so they know when they can collect the book or be quickly informed if we aren’t able to supply it and researchers can order the books for direct delivery to their workplaces. This is a popular, well-used service which saves academics time.

If you are going to create a similar system in other libraries consider this:

  • Consider which workflow that should be in this system. Sometimes there are different streams in different departments, which may be useful to bring together.
  • It is important that the staff who will work in the system are very involved in the development. They should set the framework for what the program should do and how the interface should appear.
  • It takes time. Make time to develop the system and then more time to further develop and fix glitches after the system is running.

Learn more about the Viola system through Eva’s presentation at LIBER’s 2014 Annual Conference (below).

Stockholm University Library is one of the largest university libraries in Sweden. The Library has about 120 staff and 9 different locations in the campus. The main library has about 5,000 visitors per day and 2.5 million printed volumes, half of the collection is in closed stacks. A normal day during the semester we have about 300 book orders that we have to collect. The vast majority of our collection has an RFID chip.

[A librarian scanning books with the Viola system. Image by Stockholm University Library / CC-BY]