Floaters: Are Floating Collections Really Delivering?

Dec 17, 2024

multicolored swimming pool floaters — Photo by Siora Photography on Unsplash

Today we’re talking about a topic near and dear to my heart.

Or, wait, maybe not so near. That topic was around here yesterday…ah, I see, it was checked out by someone else, and now it lives in a different building.

We’re talking about floating collections, people. Buckle up. Because this is a bit of a ride, but also because I assume you listen to a gizmo that autonarrates these newsletters while you drive. Is that an option? That seems like a great way to consume these.

What Is A Floating Collection ?

Typically, a library collection is what we call “static.” Which means you check out a book from Branch A, and whether you return it to Branch A or Branch B of the same system, it will be sent back to Branch A, where it has a specific space on the shelves.

Floating collections work differently. If you check out a book from Branch A…you know what? We can do better than Branch A.

I once invented a fictional library called the Peter Knowles Memorial Library. This incorporated my name, plus the last name of a very famous singer, so I felt that would be a helpful marketing tool.

Let’s come up with another one…Pete’s Book Hole. Done.

If my fictional library system has a floating collection, you might need a book from PKM, but you live much closer to PBH. So you put it on hold, check it out at PBH, return it to PBH, and when you return it, it STAYS at PBH until someone requests it at another branch or checks it out from PBH and returns it to another branch.

Or, let’s say you work close to PKM, but live close to PBH. You might check something out from PBH over the weekend, but then be in the neighborhood, so you return it to PKM. If we’re floating, that items then stays at PKM.

In most basic terms, which really doesn’t require creating a fictional library system (which would DEFINITELY have coffee on tap in the lobby because coffee is legal drugs), items in the collection are not tied to a specific place. They’re nomads. Wandering kung-fu masters who go where they’re needed, probably throw a bunch of guys through plate glass windows, then hang out in town until they’re called somewhere else.

Why Is This A More Recent Development?

Well, partially because it was a fad (we’ll get to that. Oh, we’ll get to that…).

But also, cataloging systems required a certain amount of sophistication for floating to work. It’s quite a bit easier to design software to manage an inventory where everything has a static place, and it’s a little more complex to have something that allows the physical location of an item to determine where it belongs.

And/or: I would venture that designing a catalog for floating has been possible for a very long time, but until fairly recently, it wasn’t something that libraries asked for.

The Theory: Local Interest will Drive The Collection

Let’s talk about the reasons why libraries started floating their collections, and we’ll start with what I think is the most convincing one:

If you float, in theory, the collection will come to resemble the interest of patrons at a given branch.

The example that convinced me that floating was amazing was landscaping books.

We had a couple libraries in communities that were experiencing a lot of growth (which is the nice way to say they were getting super crowded), and a lot of the homes were sold with little to no landscaping. So, in theory, people at those branches would have more use for landscaping books, would put them on hold, and would return them to their home library.

Places where landscaping books were needed would become places where they were abundant. Makes sense! And it makes our lives easier. Rather than guessing what people want, they will shape the collection to reflect their interests.

The Theory: Items spend less time in transit

If a book is returned to PKM and has to be transferred back to PBH, it’ll spend at least a day in courier, and it probably won’t be back on the shelf until something like 3 days after its return.

However, if it floats, it can go back on the shelf at PKM, no need to courier it. It’ll be back on the shelf within a couple hours, drastically reducing the time items are in transit, which is time that they are technically unavailable to the public.

The Theory: Decrease of Transit Services and Page Work

One library did say the amount of material going through their courier system decreased by 22%. That’s good! Less time in transit, less material to handle, this is a good thing!

And 22% is not something to ignore. I would say it’s not unusual in our system, which isn’t huge, to get something like 15 bins of items in courier per delivery, twice a day, pre-float. If we reduce the total number of bins in a day from 30 to 25 or so, that’s not bad, and system-wide, if everyone was getting about the same, we’d be talking about a reduction of 30 bins per day, an entire single branch’s day’s worth of courier.

This is also something to consider on the page side: Pages generally check all the couriered items in, build carts, and shelve them. If they have fewer items to deal with, it does shorten the process, meaning the items that are shipped around hit the shelves a bit faster.

Anecdotally, I will also say this played out in my library system. Page Supervisors reported a pretty significant decrease of bins in courier.

Did Anyone Actually Measure These Outcomes?

What’s pretty shocking to me is that there’s very little data about whether or not floating was successful. Why is that?

I always think of libraries as being pretty data-driven and making smart, data-based decisions. If you’ve ever wanted to work for an organization that has spreadsheets of data going back decades, data that would seemingly be of absolutely no use to anyone, the library is something to consider.

Most libraries, however, didn’t measure the success of their switch to floating.

Nashville Public Library did.

Using Collection HQ, some library catalog/analytics software, and studying 18 branches, they discovered that floating collections do not perform better. They discovered that collections become unbalanced. They discovered that in order to work (surprise, surprise), floating required people check out and return items at their branch of choice, and oftentimes people do not check out and return materials to the same place.

The numbers?

Fiction circulation decreased by 7%. Large print circulation decreased by an alarming 56%. A/V showed a 43% decrease in circulation.

Nashville de-floated, and their circulation across the board went up 4.3%.

They also had a large number of items on the chopping block for weeding due to lack of use, and when they de-floated, 165,000 items were saved from weeding because they were checked out. 165,000, you guys! I don’t know how to all-caps numbers, but that feels like an all-caps number to me.

If those items cost the library a meager $7 dollars apiece, this is a savings of $1.1 million bucks.

Why Can’t We Measure Our Outcomes Now?

Well, it’s tough.

I can speak for my library system, not for all, but I think it’s fair to assume several systems share these issues.

Mainly, we’ve been floating for something like a decade, and I have to say that I can’t really put much stock in the circulation of materials today versus 10 years ago. 2007-2008 was really when streaming began, so even 10 years ago, I’m certain our DVD checkouts were very different. I’m certain eBook checkouts were quite different. The first iPad came out in 2010, and it was a few years before these were common devices.

We’ve also made some changes that altered our checkout stats during the period we’ve been floating. In my library’s case, we reduced drastically the number of renewals allowed on an item, from 15 to 3. 15 was kind of a lot, it was basically a year of renewals, but because a renewal counts as a checkout, our number of checkouts went down quite a bit (I wouldn’t necessarily advise this, y’all. Renewals are EASY checkouts, zero labor on the library’s part. Just…think about it first).

Some libraries have probably changed their checkout limits during this time. To keep harping on DVDs, while many libraries had pretty shallow checkout limits in the past, many have expanded the length of a DVD checkout and increased the number that can go out at one time, simply because there’s less demand, so the inventory can handle it.

These sorts of changes make it really difficult to compare two systems, pre-float and floating.

Look, there are lots of reasons that even if we had pre-float data, which I’m sure many libraries don’t, it wouldn’t be super useful to apply now.

I do think there are other reasons we didn’t bother, though…

Adoption Reasoning: It’s Trendy

Libraries have pretty good immunity to trends, on the surface, but behind the scenes, we’re as irrational as any Red Bull exec blasting through a line of coke before deciding that they should promote their drink by having a guy jump out of a plane IN SPACE.

As much as we love our cardigans and glasses chains, we want to do the new, hot thing, too.

I think this is part of why Drag Queen Storytime was/is such a thing. We saw libraries in major cities doing it, and then we brought it to rural midwestern towns. Perhaps not because it was what our patrons wanted, but because it was a new, exciting, fun offering.

I think we see NYPL with an awesome gift shop, and we want to replicate that, but then we realize that we don’t have ANY tourism in our small town, and the gifts rot on the shelves.

We want to keep up, we want to be relevant, and we want to deliver cutting edge service, and all of these are good-natured, good-hearted, well-intentioned things, but they don’t always bring us the best results.

And I think this explains why so many of us jumped into floating before there was much, or any, published research.

Adoption Reasoning: It Appears To Be a Cost Savings, At First

Fewer bins, less courier, less page work: less work for a similar (or even better!) result was an EXTREMELY tempting proposition around the economic downturn of 2008 or so, which also coincides with the rise of floating (ALA hosted a Floating Collections workshop in 2009).

We were a little desperate at the time. Many, many library systems were on a hiring freeze, lots of us had decreasing budgets, lots of systems ran furloughs, reduced hours, and did other things to reduce costs. If there was something that promised reduced operating costs while not sacrificing levels of service, we were all ears.

Just as a quick aside-ish on that: During bad economic times, libraries often try to maintain the same level of service, on the surface, while cutting budgets. This is a debate-able practice, IMO. On one hand, it’s good to provide the community with needed services, and when times are tough, the community needs these services a lot more. On the other hand, if the community doesn’t feel the pinch, it does perpetuate the idea that libraries exist outside of economics, which can be a problem when it comes time to vote on library budgets.

But this is too big a topic for right now. Remind me sometime, let’s do it later.

Problem: Yeah. What IS the Problem?

I’m not sure that floating is actually solving a problem libraries have so much as it’s posing problems that could potentially be solved by floating. It’s the problem AND the solution, all in one convenient package!

This is how QVC works, people. You see someone doing something, demonstrating a problem you don’t actually have, but then, to borrow a Seinfeld line, you start thinking, “You know, I don’t know that any of my knives could cut through a men’s leather dress shoe…”

The joke here, if you’ll allow me to explain it, is that you don’t necessarily NEED to ever cut through a men’s leather dress shoe.

I think floating poses the library’s primary problem as items spending too much time in transit. Which, granted, floating will almost certainly reduce that.

But the ACTUAL problem in libraries is how much time items are not spending checked out.

If items spend less time in transit but spend more time on the shelf, we haven’t really solved anything.

Another proposed benefit of floating collections is that it reduces the number of bins in courier, but I’m not sure that many library systems would cite the number of bins in courier as a primary problem they need to solve.

That’s the real problem with fads like floating collections: they present you with problems you don’t really have.

Problem: Do We Save By Decreasing in Page Work?

Look, this is the closest I’m going to come to being a total, elitist dickhead.

Pages are usually the lowest-paid library staff (with the exception of custodians and sometimes security, who really should make what a page makes). Pages typically handle the processing of materials and the shelving.

This is not me saying that they don’t matter or don’t work hard. We are in an economic system that pays people more for expertise and education than it pays people who do difficult, demanding, often necessary work. I am by no means trying to devalue the work of pages, just trying to explore whether reducing page work saves money.

By reducing the number of bins in transit, we ARE lightening their load, and that’s good. It may also be something to consider if, for example, your library is very busy and you are understaffed. If your materials are often sitting on a cart in the back for days at a time, an adjustment is appropriate.

The problem that I see with floating is that the decrease in page work comes with an increase in other types of work that are more costly. And those of us in libraries are not necessarily used to thinking about things this way because we’re not a for-profit business.

Redistribution of materials when libraries get full will increase. This is how libraries try to address imbalances sometimes (say if PKM has half the shelf space of PBH, and enough things float to PKM to cause it to be overstuffed). And this is usually a process that involves higher-paid staff.

We did A LOT of shifting as a result of our float, which is the process of addressing full shelves by moving an entire collection to be more even throughout (say, taking the fiction collection, part of which is super overfull, figuring out how many linear feet it is, how many linear feet of shelving you have, and doing the math so that each shelf has the same amount of stuff. Then you physically move EVERY BOOK IN THE FICTION COLLECTION to even things out). This is not only much harder work that building carts and shelving, it’s work that was often done by higher level staff as well as pages.

You also have to be a lot more thoughtful in tracking how floating is going, weeding from a whole collection standpoint (instead of just in your branch) and so on. And this is librarian-level work, made more difficult and time-consuming by the float.

You may also end up spending a very large amount of money on a cataloging system that can handle floating.

What I’m getting at here is that we decreased page work, which is our cheapest in terms of per-hour costs, and shuffled the work to more expensive employees. Essentially, we patted ourselves on the back for being more efficient, but we’re only more efficient in terms of bins in and out, not in terms of costs.

I think the other big issue I take with this line of thinking is that you can, if things get really rough, have staff move down the job duties ladder. Library Assistants can shelve, librarians can shelve, but pages can’t necessarily do librarian work.

If we’re looking at downturn, if we’re looking at a bare bones staff, I think that realistically looks like a librarian who does just about everything as opposed to freeing up page time.

Problem: Does Reducing Bins In Courier Save Money?

The key thing, when it comes to transit of materials, is whether it saves on routes.

As an example, if UPS is delivering packages to your house, it’s less about how many packages, more about how many trips they have to make. It’s cheaper for UPS to deliver 5 packages in one trip than it is to deliver 2 packages in 2 trips..

Most libraries did not find that they could eliminate or reduce routes by floating, they just had fewer bins to process with each trip. Meaning that the savings was noticeable in terms of number of bins and perhaps in page time, but the savings in terms of courier services was low-to-nonexistent.

Problem: Does Increasing Time-On-Shelf Increase Circulation?

I like and agree with the theory that items spending more time on the shelf, less in transit, is good. It DOES increase the opportunity for checkout and use, time-wise.

But it would seem, from the one library that actually published findings, that this is not the case.

I think the issue we run into pretty quickly is that we need to balance the benefits of increased time on A shelf versus time spent on THE RIGHT shelf.

Let’s say you have a location very near a university, and the students of that university check out a lot more short stories because MFA programs love and need short stories to teach students the mechanics of writing.

I would definitely argue that having a larger, more diverse, more interesting collection of short stories on the shelves at that branch will serve the patrons, the stats, and the collection better than having items from that same collection hit the shelves more quickly in a place they’re not necessarily likely to check out. A few days in courier that puts those items in the best possible position to be checked out might end up being more useful than a few extra days on the shelf, in general.

Problem: Patrons Dot Not Understand This System

I had MANY interactions with patrons who, upon hearing that an item wasn’t in, but that I could put it on hold for them, would just say, “That’s okay, I’ll just get it another time.” I would emphasize that it may NEVER be on the shelf here and tried to briefly explain the float, and it rarely worked.

What I don’t know is whether the person was only mildly interested in the book and therefore just figured they’d get something else, or if they really did think the book would “show up” eventually, and they could just wait.

What I do know is that those were the only interactions I had with patrons regarding the float, and they were interactions that did not end with someone walking out with a book.

And on the pro-float side, I read a lot of comments and hear a lot of things like, “It’s just a matter of patron training.”

Folks, patrons don’t need to be trained to use the library. We need to manage the library in such a way that they don’t need to learn a new system. Making a simple, logical system is OUR job, not theirs.

There shouldn’t be a learning curve for checking out books from the library. It’s like email: I don’t want to learn a new, “better” layout for gmail, I just want to answer emails and move on with my life.

Very few people want to learn a new system, they don’t want to spend time learning a new way to check out a goddamn book. That’s something they already know how to do. The part where they interact with the catalog, that’s a means to an end, not an “experience.”

I really, really think we often underestimate the human side of things. We underestimate the fact that a library checkout being a simple thing may be a huge part of its appeal.

I mean, let’s be real: If I am required to go online and request an item, if I’m required to wait, if I’m required to pick it up within a certain window, I’ve engaged in a process that puts me a mere couple of clicks away from Amazon.

Problem: It Relies On Theory That May Not Prove True

If you can recall the section from AGES ago (this IS getting very long), there’s pro-float theory that the collection will come to resemble the branch’s patronage and their interests.

This, however, doesn’t seem to play out a lot of the time.

One of the reasons may be that interest in books isn’t all that simple. The part of town I live in, for example, may have NOTHING to do with what I’m interested in. I suppose it’s possible that, to an extent, we could predict more or less likely books to please an audience based on demographic data…but I find that pretty unlikely. I mean, the landscaping example above makes sense at first mow, but the more you think about it, the more you start to think, “Okay, but one of our other branches serves a much older neighborhood with very old trees. Maybe they will have a need for landscaping materials. And, waitaminute, maybe someone who lives in an apartment but runs a landscaping business will actually make better use of these materials than an individual doing this stuff on their own.”

The other big reason I think the collection reflection theory falls flat is that not all checkouts and returns are created equal.

In our system, even before we started floating, we had one branch that typically had more returns than they had checkouts. Because they were centrally located, and, at that time, the only branch with a drive-up bookdrop.

This meant it was a very convenient location for a lot of people to quickly return items, which were often checked out from a different library.

I myself often return items to this library. Not because it’s the closest, but because it’s the most pleasant one to walk to from my house.

Now, who could predict something like that? That someone would be dropping off tons of Berserk volumes at a library because it’s on a walking route that doesn’t force them to walk along the highway?

The collections started to not really resemble interests of browsers, they resembled convenience or other preferences related to dropoff.

But, don’t worry, it gets worse…

Problem: The Issue of Divide

Nashville found that when they floated, more suburban branches with a patronage that was, on average, more highly educated, had much better collections than urban centers.

This is because highly-educated patrons are more likely to use the online catalog and put things on hold, which is the primary way floating materials move around.

The result was that all but a few of Nashville’s libraries were understocked, some having entire non-fiction sections and popular fiction authors stripped clean from their collections, while a small number of more suburban libraries had an overabundance. And overabundance often resulted in items being weeded unnecessarily.

I’m not a huge social justice-y guy, but I think a system that results in the nicest, deepest collections being in the most affluent areas of the city is not only a bad look for the library, it’s a disservice to the library users. One could argue that if the folks living in the urban center wanted the materials, they just had to put them on hold, but I would argue that A) less-educated folks are less likely to engage with the library this way, and B) people in urban centers should be able to enjoy browsing the same way people do in the suburbs.

Floating is equal, but not equitable.

I do think library service is and always has been about not only delivering what people need, but delivering it to them at their point of need. Meaning that if someone needs a book and isn’t going to put it on hold, we shouldn’t be saying, “Well, that’s just a matter of patron training.” We should be providing things to people in a way that’s useful to them, that they like and are accustomed to, whenever possible.

Look, again, I’m not a big advocate who’s saying we need to blow up this or that or whatever, but I think setting up a system that we KNOW is going to be more difficult for underprivileged people to use is an extremely questionable practice.

Problem: Differing Library Sizes

Even if you could control where and how much floating went on (which you can’t), float theory kind of assumes that your branches have similar capacities, which, I guarantee you, they do not.

Problem: Differing Library Standards

Something we discovered early on in floating is that some libraries are operating under different standards.

I’m going to put this as nicely as possible: Some libraries were built new and had new, shiny collections, and they did not like more worn books from other branches shittying up their collections.

They also were operating under the standard that a shelf being 75% full was the maximum allowance. Now, this is a decent standard, if you can manage it, but when you’re floating, you can’t be super picky on this stuff. Someone is going to put all of Chuck Palahniuk’s books on hold, and you’ll suddenly have an overfull section.

It is very difficult to break libraries of these habits. You will have staff who do not want to give in and let their collections get crapped up, and it will be extremely difficult for you to know this is happening.

Problem: Library Uniformity

Before we started floating, we had a library that had a separate paperback section, where our other branches interfiled paperbacks with hardbacks and softcovers. By the by, I think this interfiling makes sense: I see very little use in this, it’s really only for people going on vacation who don’t want to bring a large volume, which I understand, but if you’re paying $250 for a plane ticket, my concerns about the economic burden of spending $4.99 on an ebook so that it’s more travel-friendly are pretty low.

You’ll generally need to make your library collections more uniform in order to float, and I think that sucks. I do. I really think the future for libraries is more browse-y, more like a bookstore model, and less like a spines-out book depository.

And I think there’s a lot of charm and potential to having your different branches do different things.

Problem: It’s hard to unwind

Once you start floating, it’s hard to stop. How do you do it? Do you just freeze things and leave them as they are? Do you attempt to rebalance, and if so, how much?

Problem: The Drawbacks and Benefits Were Not Properly Outlined

An online survey was sent out to a bunch of library listserv members, and the big headline was:

The perception put forth by the literature— that benefits are widespread and the drawbacks both temporary and easily overcome—is not supported by the results of the survey.

Benefits of Static: Your Librarians Can Know Their Collections

Now that I’ve spent time trashing floats, let’s talk about some of the benefits of static collections.

When we were static, I was in pretty good touch with my library’s collection. I could recommend titles that were perhaps not super popular, but that I thought would be pleasing. I could walk someone out to the poetry section and have 10 or so titles in the back of my head that I could pull off the shelf.

When we floated, this was impossible. It was extremely rare to be able to walk someone out into the stacks and find something.

In my library system, and I gather this is true in a lot of systems, librarians are becoming increasingly disconnected from certain aspects of traditional library work, and I would say that primary among them is working with the collection. In order to float, you have to centralize collections activities, and this means a small number of staff do ALL the collections work.

I think handselling is an answer to low circulation. And I think a staff that knows their library’s collection has a much better ability to handsell it.

Benefits of Static: More Intelligent Builds

Our system has a branch that serves a community of very library-active young families. Their children’s programming is ALWAYS packed, always, without fail. They really can’t do enough to satisfy the parents of young children.

This is clearly a branch that should have a lot of materials for children and tweens, and I would also argue they should have a lot of teen fiction because I think the primary readers of that are women in their 30s and 40s, who are the moms most frequently bringing these kids to the library, but I digress.

This is a library that has capacity for a lot more children’s material than they have shelf space. Popular materials won’t be on the shelf too long, and picture books, which go out by the dozen, can really be jammed in because they aren’t going to sit too long.

We know enough about this branch to know what circulates, and we can build this library a collection that works for them.

When we float, we eliminate the benefits of intelligent collection design, and instead descend into the chaotic nature of chance.

Benefits of Static: Give Your Branches an Identity

More and more, I think libraries should consider giving their individual branches an individual identity.

If you have a branch that caters to a lot of older folks, it makes sense to have more newspapers in that branch than you might have in some others.

If you have a branch that is located very close to a lot of high schools, it makes sense to consider serving teens more than some other branches do.

If you have a branch that’s located downtown, near a lot of businesses and government, it makes sense to devote more space to meeting spaces.

These individual identities don’t have to be explicit, and they don’t have to determine EVERYTHING, but I think it might make a lot of sense, if you have a branch with a woodshop, to have shelving near that woodshop, and to have a great, deep, collection based specifically on woodworking, DIY, and other crafts.

If you float, you cannot reflect your branch’s identity in the collections.

An Argument In Favor of Floats: Limited Floats

I do have a couple things to say in favor of floating.

Seattle Public Library does a limited float, meaning that certain collections float while others do not. Children’s comics, for example, float, but not all children’s materials.

Kate S. does a good job explaining how this works.

However, I take some issue with the presented benefits of floating.

In a six-month period in 2017, between 26% to 32% of items in the floating collections floated to a new location each month. — Ah, okay. Seattle Public has 27 locations, and I have to wonder if the majority of those items were floating to a small number of locations, as discussed by Nashville. I have to wonder whether they floated to branches people used regularly or if they floated to branches that were convenient for materials return.

I mean, TBH, the stat that a good chunk of materials floated is less impressive to me because it doesn’t necessarily indicate that this float was good. The cynical side of me thinks this is a convenient presentation of a number that sounds better than it is.

That being said, I think a good argument for floating is that it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. You may find that floating certain collections seems to have a positive impact.

An Argument in Favor of Floating: It May Work for Some Systems

Seattle Public, which I’ve been picking on a bit (I’m sorry!), operates very differently from the library system I work for.

I see that their furthest branches are about 18 miles apart, 35 minutes by car, and you’d pass something like 10 libraries traveling between them. A more typical distance between branches in their system is something like 5 miles, 10 minutes by car. This is a pretty dense collection of libraries.

The system I work for, we have outlying branches, more like an hour away, 40-some miles away, with no public transit between the two whatsoever. And you would not pass a single branch of ours in between.

There are, of course, libraries firmly between these two extremes: Nashville’s outer libraries are something like 15-20 miles away from their city center, and this may be something like a 15-minute drive.

The way floating may function in a dense, urban setting may be quite different from the way it may function in a more rural setting. Floats will definitely function differently depending on how different the traffic is at your libraries, how different the checkout/return ratio is, and how different the user demographics of your different branches are.

It may also be very different in a 5 library system versus a 27-location system like Seattle’s. It may be very different in Seattle because, I would venture, it’s got a fairly high level of comfort with technology and using the online catalog because it’s a highly educated city.

It warrants looking at a system that resembles yours as opposed to a system that’s pretty different.

It’s not about being competitive, it’s not about providing the same level of service as a large, urban system. It’s about acknowledging that some of the ways NYPL operates just don’t make sense for a rural Wisconsin library system.

Let’s Consider Other Ways to Achieve These Goals

What are your goals for the float, and what are some other options?

Nashville did manage to reduce typical wait times by a full day just by pulling their holds lists twice a day and by adjusting the priority system for holds fulfillment. These are invisible changes from the front end that achieved the same goals as floating: They reduced wait times.

If your goals are to increase circulation, decrease wait times, or keep collections fresh and refreshed, floating should be an option on the table, but it should be one of at least a few.

Floating is not panacea. Floating is not something you should do to pad your resume, and it’s not something you should do to “change things up.” It should be something you consider to solve specific problems, and it should be one option of many that is discussed.

My Plea:

Figure out if floating is actually working. Figure out the degree to which it’s working.

Consider the angles. Consider the cost of 5 hours of page work per week versus 2 hours of page supervisor work. Consider the cost of buying more materials to compensate for transit times as opposed to the cost of managing a floating collection.

Consider the problems. What are the problems floating was meant to solve? Are these the primary problems you’re having?

Consider the data from a library system that is similar to yours. Consider the data from several systems more or less like yours.

I would also desperately plead with you to consider floating in a limited capacity or in a way that is not binary, yes or no. Maybe some collections would benefit from floating. What if floating was switched on an off at times when you feel the collection could use refreshing?

Whatever you do, don’t just do it with no plans to evaluate it, no method of evaluation in place from the get-go, and no pre-float data to examine.

Do the work. Don’t just do the thing.

Pete's Librarian Thoughts

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