Hi all,

Here’s the Notes from The Scribe for November 2018.

This will be a shorter version. This month we played around testing some limits of the system itself and some improvements to our own processes as we get ready to roll out this service in full. The library’s Duplication on Demand Committee has met twice and we are shaping how our service will work moving forward with this exciting offering. Let’s go over some brief highlights since I last updated you all.

In November we finally put all staff on to the service as a test group so that we could run larger batches of duplication jobs. What we discovered with this process is that The Scribe is up to the task (so far). The speed of duplication whether you are copying one cartridge or 12 doesn’t really change much. In our sample, one cartridge typically takes 3.5 minutes to put 5 books on one cartridge and 4.5 minutes to put 5 books onto 12 cartridges at the same time, in 2 different locations. I say 12 because that’s all the staff we had up on the system at the time we started the tests. We still need to run the remaining cards for the rest of staff (13 more people) and put together cartridge sets. Once we have that we will look at 15 at a time. We do note that there seems to be a kind of sleep mode from starting out the day running this. There is a little delay when you start up first thing and put everything in motion, which isn’t as pronounced the rest of the time. As we go forward and the units run more throughout the day we will see how this pans out. But if you want to run 12 cartridges (patron orders) at the same time, this device does that well.

The next phase will be to run all cartridge slots on both units at the same time. This should happen in the next week or so once we get all staff setup.

Another thing of major note, the committee decided that rather than calling the service Patron-Centric Cartridge or PCC service, we have adopted the name Books on Demand or BOD. The group decided that this would be easier for the patrons to understand. The term Patron-Centric Cartridge is meaningless from a patron standpoint. The method behind how those books (and magazines) are served doesn’t matter to the patron. While this is a PCC type of Duplication on Demand Service we will refer to it as Books on Demand or BOD for simplicity. Also this leaves open the option of using other types of delivery for patron reading materials.

One final note, a group of 15-20 patrons will begin pilot testing the system in mid-December. We have worked out most of the kinks in the system, but the next step is patron feedback that we’ll get so we can fine tune some things. The hope is to move beyond the pilot by mid-January and roll things forward. We think we’re on target for that to happen. As we say around here "this is getting real".

Here are some photos of this month's testing of more cartridges (patron orders) at the same time on a larger scale.

As cartridges are inserted The Scribe recognizes them each and, if all is well the light turns blue to indicate that the cartridge is seen and ready

All is working well. Cartridge slots filled with cartridges and all are blue indicating that the duplication process is beginning

When a patron duplication job completes, and the cartridge is checked out, the light goes to green that tell you to pull it and send it out in the mail

When a red light comes on it means there’s an issue with the cartridge or the patron account. These red cartridges get pulled and put to the side with the case (not shown) to be dealt with after the run. In this case there weren’t actually any books added to this new patrons service queue by staff.

That's all for this edition of Notes From The Scribe. The next edition will come out with the next round of updates and new features.