Robert and I walked to the central library (1.2 miles, round trip) to pick up some books that I had requested. Unlike the execrable Austin public library system, Snow City lets you create a request queue with a reasonable number of items (100 at SC versus 5 at Austin). On the screen with the item details, it tells you what number you will be in the queue if you request it. This weekend I put about 25 books in my queue, several of which I could see were immediately available.
This morning, I got an email from them announcing that 8 of my books were ready to be picked up. When we got there, the entire experience was self-service. There is a holding area where you find your items on the shelf, then you check out using a self-service scanner like at the grocery store (which I fumbled around with quite a bit, actually).
The library is pretty neat looking, too.
6 comments:
I actually found 100 items to be almost an unreasonably large number of reservable books. It does allow you to request books which others have out, without losing one of your slots, but 25-30 would probably be enough. (If all 100 were available at one time, would you have to pick them all up and read them in three weeks?)
A few things:
(1) It's 100 total items, which includes CDs, DVDs, etc., in addition to books.
(2) I think most people will use the queue as a combination of getting on the list for popular and/or not-yet-available items (several books I put on mine just came out and are still "under order" at the library.
(3) Technically, you would have to pick them up and return or renew in 3 weeks if you actually put 100 available books on your queue and they pulled them all for you. But probably most library patrons are able to manage their queues reasonably well to avoid this. (I mean, if they weren't, wouldn't they be motivated to change it?)
In any event, I think 100 is a much better limit than 5.
I don't know what our limit is, but I usually have 40-50 items in my queue. Most of them are not published yet or ordered but not in yet or I am way down on the list. This includes DVDs. These can have as many as 350 people waiting. So, it seems like 50 items would be alot, but actually it works out pretty well.
Our hold shelf is available to the patron, who then can use the self-check.
For one of the books in my queue, I'm like #850 (though they have a couple of dozen of them on order).
How many items can you have checked out at a time? Our limit is 50 with a two week checkout.
100 items with check outs varying from 1 week (DVDs) to 3 weeks (books).
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