Young children will soon be able to watch one of the library’s newest pieces of technology in action.
Renovations will begin this month to create room in the St. Albert Public Library’s circulation room to create enough space for a $200,000 sorting system. The machine, when installed in December, will automatically read radio frequency identification silicon tags that have been inserted into the library’s 900,000 materials, then move them by conveyor belt to one of seven bins.
The new system will free up time that library staff now spend manually sorting every item that’s placed in the drop box of the circulation room, said library director Peter Bailey. The renovations to the room also call for replacing frosted glass around the drop box with clear glass so people can see the library’s newest addition.
“There’s not quite enough room to fit it in there, so we’re going to have to move one wall and that’s necessitated doing a lot more stuff around the circulation desk, for example,” Bailey said.
Bailey and project director Kathleen Troppmann were meeting with the contractor Friday to determine when exactly in November work will begin. When work begins, circulation staff will be moved towards the library entrance because the wall extension will butt up against its current location.
Both Troppmann and Bailey said they don’t anticipate closing the library during renovations, but that could change if needed.
“It will be service as usual as much as we can,” Troppmann said.
The new sorting system was approved in the 2012 budget for a total cost of $500,000. Once approved, the library quickly hired temporary staff to insert identification tags into all its materials. Items without tags were briefly taken out of circulation so they could be tagged.
“It went very, very smoothly,” Bailey said. “There were a few minor hiccups with the system thinking one item was a different item, but that would be like one out of thousands.”
The library also brought in new self-check scanners that, instead of reading an item’s barcode, read the data on the radio frequency tag when items are placed on a grey square. Materials also no longer have to be demagnetized.
“Eventually we’d like patrons to be able to check out a stack of items at a time,” Bailey said.
Troppmann said the renovations have to be finished before the sorting unit arrives. She predicted that would take place in mid-December. Installation and training could take as little as four days, she estimated.
A study conducted on the number of items returned through the 24-hour drop box in the St. Albert Place parking lot concluded significantly fewer were returned at that location, meaning staff will still retrieve them manually.
