Despite a late-in-the-day time slot, Cindy Orr, Library Consultant at Cynthia Orr Consulting and Deborah Ensor, Director of Technical Services at Cuyahoga County Public Library spoke to a full house about returning the Technical Services department to its role as the “central engine of the library.”   They spoke from their experience revamping the technical services work flow at the Cuyahoga County Public Library.  Cuyahoga, which encompasses the cities and towns surrounding Cleveland, Ohio, added 767,000 items to the collection last year, circulated 19 million items and processes 20,000 items a week.  Before a work flow make-over, the technical services staff had a backlog of over 2000 boxes of unprocessed acquisitions.  Using a methodology that engaged managers and staff alike (and some overtime!) they were able to alter the work flow and eliminate the backlog in three months.  They now enjoy a three day turnaround for new receipts, delivering items received early in the week before the week is out.

Said Orr, “the world doesn’t care about our excuses.  If you can work through your procedures and get your turnaround time down, you can work just-in-time instead of just-in-case.”  She encouraged technical service managers and staff alike to be proactive about acquisitions – to know what is going to be popular BEFORE it is published, get records for titles into the catalog in advance of publication so patrons can place holds on it, ordering sufficient copies to meet anticipated demand, and get new titles on the shelves on the ‘street date’, when it is first available in bookstores and Amazon.    This approach, she says, ‘makes public services staff look like geniuses.  When a patron asks about a soon to be published title, even if the reference staff has never heard of it, it comes up in the catalog and delights the patron.

Other tips from Orr and Ensor:

- have your vendor deliver records for titles you’ve ordered with street dates in them, rather than simply the year of publication (patrons will know when to expect it to be available)

-have the records in the catalog pre-publication

- have policies that maintain holds as long as necessary  (do your holds policies support holds placed today for a title with a street date of November, 2010?)

- think through the whole process, not just your part of it (Tech Services needs to be creative and  involved in marketing and display of new titles)

- have good selectors that will identify what will be hot and get it ordered

According to Orr and Ensor, assuring new titles are on the shelf when patrons are looking for them will put Tech Services back in a key, central position in the library.  Session handouts include a great checklist of questions to ask as you evaluate your technical services work flows.