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January 30, 2006
Home Delivery of Items
"My dream," said the LiB, "is to see a day where someone can do from home anything he or she could do in a physical library. That is my dream," she said as she lowered her eyes in reverance of serving the remote user as considerately as the in-person user.
So, have you all heard about the libraries in Illinois (quite close to where I grew up) that are offering home delivery of items to users? I think it's a fabulous idea, and one for which I'm anxious to see the results.
Here's my first problem with it. It costs $4 per item. That's really quite high, in my humble opinion. One of the Library Directors notes that they're trying to compete with Amazon and NetFlix. Well, at $4 per item you're not competing--you're going to lose.
Here's my second problem: they're discouraging people to return the items via mail, but instead to use the library's 24 hour drop-boxes. The reason people would use home delivery would be that they either have to or prefer to stay at home. To say, oh yes, we'll send it to you, but you have to bring it back to us, defeats the purpose of the program. If this was my project, I'd recommend an immediate pre-paid envelope or box model like NetFlix so people could simply drop the item in the mail when they're done with it.
There is a lot of potential with a service like this, but I think that some real improvements can be made before something like this can go mainstream and be as successful as we would like it to be.
January 30, 2006 | Permalink
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Comments
With these examples, it does seem like home delivery is workable--there are just a few workflow issues (for the library and especially for the patron) that need to be worked out. There is great potential here...I just think it will take several iterations to get it right for your users' needs.
Posted by: Sarah Houghton (LiB) | January31, 2006
When I was taking online classes at University of Maryland University College, their library offered home delivery for online students outside of Maryland. I used it a few times -- it was a great service, but they had a few bugs to work out. The books would usually come wrapped in whatever discarded packing material they had laying around, and it often wasn't suitable for reuse to return the books. So you had to find your own book mailers or bubble wrap to protect the material on the return trip, and then schlepp over to the post office to figure out the proper postage. As I recall, there wasn't even a return address on the package, so you also had to dig around to find where to send the books when done. I agree that some sort reusable, prepaid book mailer would be the way to go if you really want to make this service convenient.
Another bothersome issue was the way that the service was integrated with the OPAC. You could log in and request any book by simply hitting a button, but there was no way to indicate special delivery instructions. Instead, they would automatically ship it out to the address was attached to your student ID. This was a bad idea in my neighborhood, since UPS packages left on my doorstep tended to walk away. A few times I was able to call the library and get a real, human librarian to redirect the shipments to my work address. But it wasn't a simple process.
Luckily, between UMUC's excellent collection of online databases and Nashville's first rate public library, I was usually able to get what I needed without using the mail-out service.
Posted by: David | January31, 2006
Denmark has a "books to your doorstep" programme, but it's not clear to me whether it's for general use or for researchers.
http://katalog.deff.dk/about/?lang=en
Posted by: Richard Akerman | January31, 2006
I work at a private, academic library. The college has a satellite campus about 60 miles away from our main campus.
We offer our remote users free mail delivery of our materials. We've also made agreements with the public libraries in our satellite's area to send the materials back to us through our statewide material delivery service at no charge to our patrons. Our users just have to drop the materials in any library's drop box (the books are banded to make it easy for the public library workers to identify). We considered a SASE, but figured that it would be easier to band the book and not force our patrons to keep track of a box or envelope.
Posted by: Mike | January30, 2006
