Noel Rutherford is the Material Services Manager at Nashville Public Library. Her library career began in 1996 in DC Public Libraries, and she then moved to Nashville 17 years ago to work in Collection Development Management. She has been utilizing collectionHQ since 2013.
In this blog, Noel shares her perspective on floating collections, why her library system switched to a transfers-based approach, and how to use data to find the right location for items in your collection.
Over the years, I’ve been consulted often about floating collections, mostly due to the 2014 research I published in Library Journal about floating collections and the fact that as a result of that research, I went against the tide and turned off floating for our library system.
We all know the core benefits that have made floating collections popular.
Floating collections can cut costs by reducing the number of delivery trucks in rotation between branches – not to mention reducing the purchase of unnecessary copies of items.
Floating collections can be a good way to freshen up a collection, as materials rotate between locations. This can give lesser-used titles a new lease of life as new customers can discover them. In Nashville Public Library, we’ve found that large-type materials are a great candidate for floating, as when a patron has read them once, they are unlikely to read them again.
There is also, of course, the idea that a floating collection helps customers to decide which materials are in their branch. This way the collection serves each community of patrons, and popular items are more readily available.
However, in my opinion, customers do not “decide” in any analytical way, where an item should be owned and frequently return material where it is most convenient, not where they themselves checked it out. This can result in collections ending up where they are not in fact needed.
With the help of my team, I am in charge of all the material acquisitions across the Nashville Public Library system.
We are a county and city library system that spans 21 locations with both urban and suburban branches. Our patrons are hugely diverse, with six major languages spoken and a large disparity in income and education. As a result, our collection requirements are very eclectic. We have around one million physical items, and around 500,000 digital assets.
Our collection development is centralized through our main library, rather than managed at branch level. It’s more efficient to make collection decisions on titles across all formats once, using staff with the time and focus to become experts.
Of course, each branch still has a say in the material on their shelves! The only difference is that all requests are sent to one central location. We receive around 700 requests from the public and staff each month, so we’re very involved in managing what each branch needs.
Over time, we found that floating our collection led to an inequality in how materials were distributed and that the number of holds placed would dictate the materials a library had on their shelves.
Our power library users, mostly located near large libraries at the edges of the county were placing most of the holds and checking material out from one library but often returning them to another library location out of convenience. This resulted in two problems:
- Smaller, inner-city locations located conveniently on the way to downtown Nashville, were inundated with material that they had no room for and no demand.
- Large library locations that placed far more holds were depleting the popular material collections from smaller, inner-city locations whose customers did not place many holds.
Also, our bigger libraries would end up weeding out excess copies of the same item, while branches that placed fewer holds would lose out and have no copies.
Floating can work well in suburban libraries where customers come from similar demographics and that have similar size branch locations. Our users are very diverse and our buildings vary greatly in size, making the haphazard floating placement of material problematic.
Non-fiction, for example, was being stripped of entire subjects when requested by parents homeschooling their children, as these materials would be delivered to a local branch and never returned to their original location.
Plus, our staff ended up feeling overwhelmed – either by a surplus of library materials or empty shelves – and disengaged because they had limited input on their branch collection.
Ultimately, we realized that the size of our system and the diversity of our community made it too difficult to float our collection, and we switched it off in 2014.
Analyzing our collection with collectionHQ.
I started using collectionHQ in 2013 to clean up our collection, weeding and removing items that hadn’t circulated in a long time. Then we looked at our collectionHQ parameters and adjusted them to better suit our circulation figures and location demand.
Our collection was no longer responding to demand, so it was time to dig into performance at a more granular level. We looked at patterns of overstocked and understocked materials across branches, as well as popular author and subject coverage. After we turned on floating, we noticed the performance of the collection in all these categories declined.
Floating often results in cost savings from reduced transit volume that can eliminate delivery routes. At Nashville, partly due to our county size, we didn’t have enough volume reduction to also reduce our transit routes. And although cost savings are important, the ultimate goal is to ensure we are responding to our customer’s collection needs.
When performance declined and with no cost savings realized, we decided to turn off floating.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that some titles do need to move!
A title that is overstocked or dead in one branch can be in high demand in another – but often, library staff weed these items, instead of relocating them where they could perform better. Understanding your data helps you send titles to branches where they are more likely to circulate.
After turning off floating in 2014, we decided to use collectionHQ to make transfer decisions. Since then, we have transferred over 55,000 items between our branches, totaling 378,000 circulations.
collectionHQ allows you to track the performance of items transferred. These reports show that our system relocated items that hadn’t circulated for an average of 15.5 months. They currently average at least 2 circulations a year in their new locations.
This has helped reduce the purchase of unnecessary items and the accidental weeding of materials that are in demand elsewhere.
Whether you float your collection or not, use tools to make the process easier.
We’ve used collectionHQ’s Transfer reports with great effect for both Popular Authors and Popular Subjects within our collection.
We’ve also reduced unnecessary expenditures by using the Grubby Item Refresh reports that send items that are under-performing at one location to replace well-loved copies in another – saving the need to buy a new version.
Staff members run these reports every month in their branch. This has made them much more engaged with collection management, as they are effectively shopping for their own shelves.
Start where makes the most sense for your collection.
To optimize how your collection moves I recommend starting high-level and working down. collectionHQ’s Collection Use Summary reports, for example, can analyze your overstocked and understocked materials.
Start with the subjects that are in the highest demand. Some library systems might be worried about the amount of time staff will need to spend on these reports, but if you focus on completing your highest “required” transfers first, and tell staff to complete the lowest “required” items only if they have time, you’ll better prioritize staff resources. You might be surprised at the results the data brings back. I’ve seen this analysis cause major shifts in collections.
It can take time and effort to set up the right parameters for your circulation figures. Be patient and continue to make adjustments as time goes on.
Finally, ensure your staff understand the benefits of the analysis work, and that they are invested in continuously improving the circulation of your collection.
The more access you have to your data, the better you can make evidence-based decisions and ensure your collection matches the needs of your patrons in every location.
Thank you, Noel, for all your fascinating insights in this post!
collectionHQ customers can contact their Customer Success Manager for advice and training on how to use the toolset to support both floating and non-floating collections. Your Customer Success Manager is your very own collectionHQ consultant and can help you to maximize tools like the “transfer” functionality described in this blog!
If your library is not a customer of collectionHQ and you would like to learn more, click here to contact our team or to arrange a demo.