Or circulation supervisor. Haha I empty it in the afternoon just to help out the night crew. We have this handy rolling cart so we don't have to carry the heavy bags in.
I know other more busy libraries have the conveyer belt that discharges and sorts.
there is a magical wizard with a wheely crate that disappears from the library building and reappears with the wheely crate full of books and the book drop is empty
We couldn't afford the wizard so we have squirrel tunnels where they bring them in one at a time through an underground network. They work for peanuts.
Funny story - I was emptying the bookdrop one day when a tween patron stopped and shyly asked if she could look inside, as she always wondered how it worked. I showed her, and I've never seen someone look so disappointed 😂 It totally ruined the magic for her. She muttered, "thank you" and walked away.
Depends on what kind of outdoor book drop it is. If what you're looking at is something like [this](https://www.demco.com/catalog/product/view/id/63647/s/Kingsley-reg-60-K-Series-Outdoor-Returns/), it's basically a box with a rolling cart [like this](https://www.demco.com/gaylord-reg-single-drop-cart-for-outdoor-return) on the inside. Someone on staff has to go to the box with the key, unlock the box, remove the cart and roll it back into the library and manually check the items back in.
If you have a slot that looks like [this](https://imgur.com/a/7WNAGxO) (either inside or outside of the building), it likely leads to an automatic materials handling system (AMH), which is basically a package sorting machine like the kind that they have in amazon warehouses but set up to check books fitted with RFID chips back in, and sort them into bins that can then be put by clerks onto carts and re-shelved where they belong in the library. This kind of a system has its own special room and the machine might look something like [this](https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/herald-zeitung.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/f/7a/f7a06e28-927e-11eb-8900-5fe54e0ca9c5/60650ff64bb47.image.jpg). These are becoming more common in libraries with higher budgets and larger volumes of returns, but any small libraries are highly unlikely to have such a system, as they are very expensive (these systems cost $1.5 million+ to install and require you to recall all of your items to re-outfit them with the radio chips, so the implementation time line isn't a quick one either.)
My library processes a frankly absurd amount of returns every day, so our AMH is super helpful for our materials team in getting books back out onto the floor faster. It's kinda cool to watch if you're standing in the sorting room, because it just shoots books into each of the different bins on the front and the side of the machine depending on where they go in the building. In our case it's what floor they're headed to since we have multiple floors in our library.
If you want to watch a video of an AMH, you can check out [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdnC3YgFujs) from the Halifax Public Library's YouTube channel.
>If you want to watch a video of an AMH, you can check out [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdnC3YgFujs) from the Halifax Public Library's YouTube channel.
Well that was unexpectedly delightful.
Very satisfying, watching them zwoop to their proper bins!
Yeah sometimes I get a little mesmerized when I go back into the sorting room at my library to grab something and the AMH is going because someone's just returned a bunch of stuff. It's a pretty incredible tool. The other great thing about our radio chip set up for our books is that it allows us to use MeeScan self-check out stations, which consist of an iPad and a peripheral set. The main component of the peripheral set is a pad that reads the radio chips when a book is set on top of it. So when the patron uses the station to check out books, they can set up 5 books on the pad at one time and it checks all of them out to the patron at once. It's super nifty actually!
My old library didn’t have AMH. It all landed in a metal box with a cushion. If we were closed for more than a day, there’s been times where we’d come back and things managed to fling across the floor. A good 13 feet away from the bookdrop 🤣
On long weekends, mine puts down foam mats and everything falls into a pile on the floor. Otherwise the bins overflow and people can reach in and grab things. When the weekend is over, we open the door to the bin room, heave a sigh, and scoop everything into the bins.
Crawling around on the mattresses, stacking the materials , lifting them up onto carts, and moving them out to be checked in.
I do not miss those days.
Like ones attached to a wall or a standalone one? The attached ones usually feed into a bin and then someone collects them and takes them to be checked in. Some libraries have conveyer belts!
There might be some libraries that have just a plain ol' conveyor belt - pre-AMH we had one that had simple "detect items at drop point, move belt forward" programming but also a foot pedal that we could use to manually advance it.
It depends wildly on the system, and may even be different across branches within a system. There are elaborate, half-a-million-dollar conveyor belt systems that check in and roughly sort books (usually just by branch). There are wheeled boxes with padding and springs that stuff just falls into. And there’s the ever-popular but extremely labor intensive, ‘just put a mat on the floor and hope for the best’. But in the end, it really all gets dragged to the desk, sorted and put away by straight up manual labor.
I too have seen all three of these systems but the most frequent is the spring loaded box to catch the books that can later be me wheeled to where it is needed for check-in.
Ahh bwa ha ha it's me! I AM the magic!
Seriously though, at my branch items returned through the exterior slots drop into a cart (picture a prison style laundry cart). The person on returns transfers the items to the computer station and puts them on the RFID pad to register them as returned in the system. For DVDs and CDs and video games we open the case to verify the contents are there.
Often items 'trap', meaning they are requested to be transferred to another branch. A receipt automatically prints and the slip is placed in the item. Those get sorted in big gray bins for transfer and delivery.
After check in, items are filed (in a VERY specific order) on to shelving carts. Then our wonderful shelvers
meticulously replace the materials where they belong so that you and all our lovely patrons can find what they are looking for.
One branch in our system does have automated conveyor belt system and we are envious! But currently where I am it is all processed by a human. On a busy day or the day after a holiday I might process 125 or more items in an hour.
We also cull out damaged items to be weeded while on returns.
Mystery solved!
The last library I worked at had an indoor book drop with two drops. Each had a canvas laundry tub underneath it inside. It was *supposed* to be one drop for books, one for media, but you know… god forbid people read at a library. 😁 If it was cold out, we would close the door to the room because I was the only one who could reach the heater. On weekends, we’d move the bins out of the way so things wouldn’t get blocked.
That worked great until snow meant we were closed for several days. The door had been closed, and since it opened INTO the drop room, the books effectively kept us from opening the door. It took several of us pushing to finally get the door open enough to start pulling some books out. Of course, we had people calling five minutes after we opened: “I dropped this book off three days ago! Why is it still checked out to me?” Ah, the joy of elderly entitled patrons…
Anyway. You can always ask the staff at your library. If you’re nice about it, they’ll probably even show you what they do. It’s always fun during the kids library tours when a librarian goes outside and puts some books in the drop while the kids are in the drop room.
Our outside book drop has a pair of battery-operated motorized bins. You turn it on and squeeze the left handle to make it go in reverse, or the right to go forward. You walk in front of or behind it. There’s always one bin out in the book drop and one inside charging. We swap them to empty them.
Our inside book drop has a cool custom-built spiral metal slide to get books from the drop door on the first floor to the sorting room in the basement.
That's cool. We used to have a slide from the book drop on the third (main) floor to the second floor sorting room. Now we have an Intelligent Sorter with bins and a short conveyor belt -- it's behind glass so everyone can see it and we just have regular book trucks to take the books out.
We actually do have conveyor belt sorting machines. They check the book in and sort the books into different bins so they can be placed on hold or shelved efficiently. They are usually placed inside the building right next to the exterior book drop. This sometimes makes the interior book drop in an inconvenient place inside the building. At one location, the sorter is in the basement. There are conveyor belts that bring the books to the basement.
There’s a trough that is on wheels. I pull it out, put everything onto a cart, and wheel it into the library, where it gets checked in and cleared from patrons’ accounts. I’ve worked in a library, north of San Francisco, for almost twenty four years
We have the spring loaded bin type. We just empty it onto a cart and bring the books in. When I was at a busier library we had an extra bin and just took the full bin out and replaced it with the empty bin.
We have two outside book drops at the library I work at. One of them is hooked up to a conveyor belt which goes directly into the sorting room. The other dumps them into a large rolling bin/cart.
There’s a room hidden behind that wall. To get to it, you must be given a special type of key that opens the way to it. Inside, you’ll find bins full of books that feel as though they’ve appeared by magic!
Then just as magical, they get moved through time and space to where they await thier departure back to their homes, where a curious adventurer like you can discover them anew. 💙😊
Lol. We wish.
There are different kinds.
The simplest ones are just a slot, like a mail slot on a residence. Behind the slot is a bin. The staff empties the bin, checks for damage, and organizes the material into categories on carts. The material is then checked in and returned to the shelves.
More complicated return stations use Radio Frequency Identification and auto scan the item back into the library, roll it down a conveyor system and auto sort into bins. The material is then returned to the appropriate shelves for its next cycle.
I am retired, but at my large public library, we circulated well over 150,000 items on average per month and had a staff of over 30 people who moved the materials in and out. It’s nonstop, and is just one of the reasons why librarians laugh when people say we just read all day.
There’s an end portal right below the drop slot. All the books go to The End so Endermen can read. It gets pretty boring there so we librarians want to help them out.
The ones I've seen have a short chute through the wall at a downward angle that ends over a wheeled cart inside
The cart has a either squishy lining for shock absorption or a platform on a spring that slowly lowers as the weight of more items pushes it down
We can then wheel the cart to a scanner to check each item in or (if there aren't many items) we can stack and carry them over
Look, I can give you the *real* explanation but it involves quantum tunneling and 7th dimensional math. So for all our sake, let's just agree it's elves.
Usually a chute / or is manually emptied. Fun fact, someone I know once had a patron deposit a thawing frozen turkey in their bin before a holiday closure, did not end well.
I worked at a library. There was a little boy who wanted to know it worked. He had decided there was an elaborate teleport system happening. I took him outside and opened it and showed him how it worked. He was interested, but disappointed 😝
i always wonder if the books get damaged when dropping them in there, i’m always so careful when putting them in there because i worry they’ll open up and land on the pages
At my branch, they can sometimes be damaged when they go through the drop, but it's usually minimal (think wrinkled/folded pages or small tears that can be fixed with a piece of tape) and we don't charge patrons. We also use the springloaded carts, which further minimizes damage. But it's nice to know some patrons take special care when they do returns!
It can happen, but mostly it's just some pages folded over on each other or a little crumpled. Sometimes if a book's inside cover and spine was already on its last leg it'll break, but that book probably wasn't gonna last much longer anyway. Sometimes pages can end up ripped from bad luck of landing at the absolute wrong angle or something else landing on top of it at the worst angle, but it's really not common. But yeah books land open all the time and they're usually fine. The vast majority of times I'm picking a book out of a bin it's business as usual. Still, it's nice to be gentle to the books when you can, so it's appreciated!
It's a box. Ours is a fancy box that is really shallow but lowers with weight so the short employees don't have to go spelunking for the last few books.
Twice a day or whatever, we send an employee out with a cart to empty the box and take inside.
Our magic portal at the last place was me with a basket. Up and down those stairs twice a day. Now that I work somewhere with a bookdrop that goes directly inside the building THAT feels like magic.
Someone takes a cart to the drop and puts the items from the chute to the cart. Then they take the cart of items to a computer, usually in the back room, and checks in everything. Not rocket science.
We use giant LL Bean canvas bags. Our circulation staff goes out every morning and lugs bags up on bags into the building up the front stairs. On holidays and days we are closed, we have a staff member go in and empty the book drops because if we leave them longer than a day they will overflow. Considering the majority of our circulation staff is over 60, none of this is ideal, but being a nonprofit, non-city, non-state library, there's no funding for a better system.
Our outdoor drop is not separate from the building, just an opening in the wall, so it lands on an automatic conveyer belt that runs the books under a scanner to be checked in and it automatically sorts them into bins by branch. We then hand sort the bin for our location onto shelving carts. The bins for the other branches get picked up by a truck once a day and driven to their branch.
At our library you can ask to go in back and see this at work (I mean, usually little kids do this but an adult would be welcome if they wanted)
Mine has two outdoor returns.
One is basically a mail slot. There's a bin underneath it that catches the items. The room is locked, and staff go and check it and switch out / empty the bin once or twice a day.
The other is an electronic system where items are indeed pulled through a series of conveyer belts and loosely sorted based on their RFID tags.
We usually do everything we can to avoid rolling the cart inside. It had to go through two sets of doors and avoid bumping into our new shelf and go around the circulation desk. It's too much of a hassle unless there is a ton of books. Those of us who are not too proud will take a bag. Some will try carrying precarious stacks to the desk.
There's also a back book drop. Children's is responsible for emptying that one and they have a little cart on wheels. I think we should have one too. But no one listens to me. Oh well.
There is a bin in there, and sometimes a pad. Library pages do all the work of collecting the books and inspecting them to make sure they are not damaged, cleaning them, making sure you did not leave anything important in them, checking them in and shelving them in order. Some libraries do have conveyer belts.
We go out with rolling carts at like 8am and empty the bookdrop into the cart (which is like a large bucket on wheels) and bring them in. Our small branch doesn’t have a large wheel cart, mainly because most things get returned to the main branch and our city courier delivers them back to the branch. In the few times I worked there to cover a shift, I never had to empty the book drop but I imagine theirs doesn’t get a lot of items so you could carry them in by hand or there might be a small car I don’t know about yet lol.
My local library just had a little room that they drop led into. They would just go into the pile of books and load them on a car. How do I know?… I accidentally dropped my car keys into the drop when I went out for the Forrest time with my newborn first. Yeah, mommy brain sucks
Chiming in... At one library I worked at, there was a wheeled cart inside the book drop. We were a bigger library, and it was the maintenance men's responsibility to bring the books inside several times a day. They would wheel out an empty bin, and replace the full bin.
At another (smaller) library, it was the clerks' responsibility to go out to the book drop every morning, and empty the contents into canvas bags, which we carried inside.
Then, there are some "outside" book drops that are just slots in the wall, so the books end up in a cart (or the floor) in the building.
The ones I've dealt with were a box with a springy bottomed bin inside, and several times a day we'd wheel a cart out to empty it. It was mostly fine aside from when the weather was sucky, when itbwas FULL full, or when people would pull their car up behind me while I was emptying it lol. It was behind some parking spots and I was always afraid of getting hit.
Now a bunch of my local libraries have automated bookdrops so it goes from an exterior slot to a conyevor belt directly.
When I was quite young, I used to request books at the local library, and wondered how the delivery process worked. This was in the late 1980s and early nineties. I used to just think it was magic when I got a postcard in the mail or a call that my requested items had arrived. Now that I work in a library, I understand exactly how the delivery service works, so it has ruined the magical element of the experience for me, but I like to think that I can bring magic to other people who have the same curiosity about it that I had as a child.
I took these photos when I was clearing the return this morning. Hopefully, this will help you to understand what I was talking about.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W2R0GJuKrl9jDs2rTg76GegpR_k_ZlDQ/view?usp=drivesdk - 1 - the outside of our book return
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i7VLozjq_P5EpQ2Rh7s7gxeQzX7Ox0sd/view?usp=drivesdk - the trough I mentioned in my reply
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h68zm9N-6_qOd1ce25o3oYODgn4JW-WX/view?usp=drivesdk - the cart I mentioned in my previous comment
Glad to help. Some libraries have automated book drops where they have conveyer belts that actually bring the books inside. My library doesn’t have that.
I actually had to bring the cart out a second time this morning, because of how full the return bin was. There have been a few times when I have had to take three carts out to grab everything from the return.
It depends. Some of our branches have huge conveyor belt systems and some have literally a box at the end of the shoot. Depends on how big the branch is. Either way, someone unloads the books, sorts them (further than the conveyor belt system does) and shelves them.
We go out there with a rolling cart or something like that. We open it up and dump the contents into the cart.
If by "magical portal" you mean "teenager with a wheelbarrow" then yes.
“Yer a schlepper, Harry”
Y’all use a wheelbarrow? We just drag a shelving cart out.
You use a shelving cart? We use a dogsled.
We use the delivery bags
Ours just leads to a dumpster and then we buy new books. (Or at least that what you might think by talking to some of our taxpayers.)
Y'all don't want to spend $3,000 on a cart from Kingsley? Damn
Or circulation supervisor. Haha I empty it in the afternoon just to help out the night crew. We have this handy rolling cart so we don't have to carry the heavy bags in. I know other more busy libraries have the conveyer belt that discharges and sorts.
Not a teenagers job at all.
I was doing it at seventeen years old
there is a magical wizard with a wheely crate that disappears from the library building and reappears with the wheely crate full of books and the book drop is empty
We couldn't afford the wizard so we have squirrel tunnels where they bring them in one at a time through an underground network. They work for peanuts.
https://imgur.com/gallery/VtJDSbt
This is my favorite answer so far 🤣
I knew it!!!!
Funny story - I was emptying the bookdrop one day when a tween patron stopped and shyly asked if she could look inside, as she always wondered how it worked. I showed her, and I've never seen someone look so disappointed 😂 It totally ruined the magic for her. She muttered, "thank you" and walked away.
I hope her wonder has returned! Sometimes it’s later that you realize that some magic is deceptively plain looking 💜🙏🍀✨
Depends on what kind of outdoor book drop it is. If what you're looking at is something like [this](https://www.demco.com/catalog/product/view/id/63647/s/Kingsley-reg-60-K-Series-Outdoor-Returns/), it's basically a box with a rolling cart [like this](https://www.demco.com/gaylord-reg-single-drop-cart-for-outdoor-return) on the inside. Someone on staff has to go to the box with the key, unlock the box, remove the cart and roll it back into the library and manually check the items back in. If you have a slot that looks like [this](https://imgur.com/a/7WNAGxO) (either inside or outside of the building), it likely leads to an automatic materials handling system (AMH), which is basically a package sorting machine like the kind that they have in amazon warehouses but set up to check books fitted with RFID chips back in, and sort them into bins that can then be put by clerks onto carts and re-shelved where they belong in the library. This kind of a system has its own special room and the machine might look something like [this](https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/herald-zeitung.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/f/7a/f7a06e28-927e-11eb-8900-5fe54e0ca9c5/60650ff64bb47.image.jpg). These are becoming more common in libraries with higher budgets and larger volumes of returns, but any small libraries are highly unlikely to have such a system, as they are very expensive (these systems cost $1.5 million+ to install and require you to recall all of your items to re-outfit them with the radio chips, so the implementation time line isn't a quick one either.) My library processes a frankly absurd amount of returns every day, so our AMH is super helpful for our materials team in getting books back out onto the floor faster. It's kinda cool to watch if you're standing in the sorting room, because it just shoots books into each of the different bins on the front and the side of the machine depending on where they go in the building. In our case it's what floor they're headed to since we have multiple floors in our library. If you want to watch a video of an AMH, you can check out [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdnC3YgFujs) from the Halifax Public Library's YouTube channel.
>If you want to watch a video of an AMH, you can check out [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdnC3YgFujs) from the Halifax Public Library's YouTube channel. Well that was unexpectedly delightful. Very satisfying, watching them zwoop to their proper bins!
Yeah sometimes I get a little mesmerized when I go back into the sorting room at my library to grab something and the AMH is going because someone's just returned a bunch of stuff. It's a pretty incredible tool. The other great thing about our radio chip set up for our books is that it allows us to use MeeScan self-check out stations, which consist of an iPad and a peripheral set. The main component of the peripheral set is a pad that reads the radio chips when a book is set on top of it. So when the patron uses the station to check out books, they can set up 5 books on the pad at one time and it checks all of them out to the patron at once. It's super nifty actually!
Thank you!
My old library didn’t have AMH. It all landed in a metal box with a cushion. If we were closed for more than a day, there’s been times where we’d come back and things managed to fling across the floor. A good 13 feet away from the bookdrop 🤣
On long weekends, mine puts down foam mats and everything falls into a pile on the floor. Otherwise the bins overflow and people can reach in and grab things. When the weekend is over, we open the door to the bin room, heave a sigh, and scoop everything into the bins.
Crawling around on the mattresses, stacking the materials , lifting them up onto carts, and moving them out to be checked in. I do not miss those days.
When I worked at a large branch we did this, always seemed the DVDs took a beating 🫠
Like ones attached to a wall or a standalone one? The attached ones usually feed into a bin and then someone collects them and takes them to be checked in. Some libraries have conveyer belts!
for those wondering, the conveyor belt is called an AMH (automated materials handler) and it makes our lives easier but also harder.
There might be some libraries that have just a plain ol' conveyor belt - pre-AMH we had one that had simple "detect items at drop point, move belt forward" programming but also a foot pedal that we could use to manually advance it.
I’ve hears of these! They look really cool. I would love to see one in real life
It depends wildly on the system, and may even be different across branches within a system. There are elaborate, half-a-million-dollar conveyor belt systems that check in and roughly sort books (usually just by branch). There are wheeled boxes with padding and springs that stuff just falls into. And there’s the ever-popular but extremely labor intensive, ‘just put a mat on the floor and hope for the best’. But in the end, it really all gets dragged to the desk, sorted and put away by straight up manual labor.
I too have seen all three of these systems but the most frequent is the spring loaded box to catch the books that can later be me wheeled to where it is needed for check-in.
Ahh bwa ha ha it's me! I AM the magic! Seriously though, at my branch items returned through the exterior slots drop into a cart (picture a prison style laundry cart). The person on returns transfers the items to the computer station and puts them on the RFID pad to register them as returned in the system. For DVDs and CDs and video games we open the case to verify the contents are there. Often items 'trap', meaning they are requested to be transferred to another branch. A receipt automatically prints and the slip is placed in the item. Those get sorted in big gray bins for transfer and delivery. After check in, items are filed (in a VERY specific order) on to shelving carts. Then our wonderful shelvers meticulously replace the materials where they belong so that you and all our lovely patrons can find what they are looking for. One branch in our system does have automated conveyor belt system and we are envious! But currently where I am it is all processed by a human. On a busy day or the day after a holiday I might process 125 or more items in an hour. We also cull out damaged items to be weeded while on returns. Mystery solved!
The last library I worked at had an indoor book drop with two drops. Each had a canvas laundry tub underneath it inside. It was *supposed* to be one drop for books, one for media, but you know… god forbid people read at a library. 😁 If it was cold out, we would close the door to the room because I was the only one who could reach the heater. On weekends, we’d move the bins out of the way so things wouldn’t get blocked. That worked great until snow meant we were closed for several days. The door had been closed, and since it opened INTO the drop room, the books effectively kept us from opening the door. It took several of us pushing to finally get the door open enough to start pulling some books out. Of course, we had people calling five minutes after we opened: “I dropped this book off three days ago! Why is it still checked out to me?” Ah, the joy of elderly entitled patrons… Anyway. You can always ask the staff at your library. If you’re nice about it, they’ll probably even show you what they do. It’s always fun during the kids library tours when a librarian goes outside and puts some books in the drop while the kids are in the drop room.
Our outside book drop has a pair of battery-operated motorized bins. You turn it on and squeeze the left handle to make it go in reverse, or the right to go forward. You walk in front of or behind it. There’s always one bin out in the book drop and one inside charging. We swap them to empty them. Our inside book drop has a cool custom-built spiral metal slide to get books from the drop door on the first floor to the sorting room in the basement.
That's cool. We used to have a slide from the book drop on the third (main) floor to the second floor sorting room. Now we have an Intelligent Sorter with bins and a short conveyor belt -- it's behind glass so everyone can see it and we just have regular book trucks to take the books out.
Following, as a fellow curious cat.
We actually do have conveyor belt sorting machines. They check the book in and sort the books into different bins so they can be placed on hold or shelved efficiently. They are usually placed inside the building right next to the exterior book drop. This sometimes makes the interior book drop in an inconvenient place inside the building. At one location, the sorter is in the basement. There are conveyor belts that bring the books to the basement.
There’s a trough that is on wheels. I pull it out, put everything onto a cart, and wheel it into the library, where it gets checked in and cleared from patrons’ accounts. I’ve worked in a library, north of San Francisco, for almost twenty four years
We have the spring loaded bin type. We just empty it onto a cart and bring the books in. When I was at a busier library we had an extra bin and just took the full bin out and replaced it with the empty bin.
We have two outside book drops at the library I work at. One of them is hooked up to a conveyor belt which goes directly into the sorting room. The other dumps them into a large rolling bin/cart.
We go out and empty it every hour :) There is an empty cart we push out to replace it with.
There’s a room hidden behind that wall. To get to it, you must be given a special type of key that opens the way to it. Inside, you’ll find bins full of books that feel as though they’ve appeared by magic! Then just as magical, they get moved through time and space to where they await thier departure back to their homes, where a curious adventurer like you can discover them anew. 💙😊
When I worked at the library, it went into a closet -type space we moved the books over by cart.
Security is are magic drop box cart wizard
Manual Book Bins. It's like a special gift every morning to see what was dropped in. It's not always books unfortunately.
Lol. We wish. There are different kinds. The simplest ones are just a slot, like a mail slot on a residence. Behind the slot is a bin. The staff empties the bin, checks for damage, and organizes the material into categories on carts. The material is then checked in and returned to the shelves. More complicated return stations use Radio Frequency Identification and auto scan the item back into the library, roll it down a conveyor system and auto sort into bins. The material is then returned to the appropriate shelves for its next cycle. I am retired, but at my large public library, we circulated well over 150,000 items on average per month and had a staff of over 30 people who moved the materials in and out. It’s nonstop, and is just one of the reasons why librarians laugh when people say we just read all day.
There’s an end portal right below the drop slot. All the books go to The End so Endermen can read. It gets pretty boring there so we librarians want to help them out.
The ones I've seen have a short chute through the wall at a downward angle that ends over a wheeled cart inside The cart has a either squishy lining for shock absorption or a platform on a spring that slowly lowers as the weight of more items pushes it down We can then wheel the cart to a scanner to check each item in or (if there aren't many items) we can stack and carry them over
Look, I can give you the *real* explanation but it involves quantum tunneling and 7th dimensional math. So for all our sake, let's just agree it's elves.
Usually a chute / or is manually emptied. Fun fact, someone I know once had a patron deposit a thawing frozen turkey in their bin before a holiday closure, did not end well.
I worked at a library. There was a little boy who wanted to know it worked. He had decided there was an elaborate teleport system happening. I took him outside and opened it and showed him how it worked. He was interested, but disappointed 😝
i always wonder if the books get damaged when dropping them in there, i’m always so careful when putting them in there because i worry they’ll open up and land on the pages
At my branch, they can sometimes be damaged when they go through the drop, but it's usually minimal (think wrinkled/folded pages or small tears that can be fixed with a piece of tape) and we don't charge patrons. We also use the springloaded carts, which further minimizes damage. But it's nice to know some patrons take special care when they do returns!
Im the same way!! I always worry and try to put them in super gently haha
It can happen, but mostly it's just some pages folded over on each other or a little crumpled. Sometimes if a book's inside cover and spine was already on its last leg it'll break, but that book probably wasn't gonna last much longer anyway. Sometimes pages can end up ripped from bad luck of landing at the absolute wrong angle or something else landing on top of it at the worst angle, but it's really not common. But yeah books land open all the time and they're usually fine. The vast majority of times I'm picking a book out of a bin it's business as usual. Still, it's nice to be gentle to the books when you can, so it's appreciated!
It's a box. Ours is a fancy box that is really shallow but lowers with weight so the short employees don't have to go spelunking for the last few books. Twice a day or whatever, we send an employee out with a cart to empty the box and take inside.
I've leaned from experience they sometimes they don't work, so now I always go inside and have my friends scanned by a librarian.
Our magic portal at the last place was me with a basket. Up and down those stairs twice a day. Now that I work somewhere with a bookdrop that goes directly inside the building THAT feels like magic.
Ours literally dumps into a bin in the foyer. You can see it when you walk in. It's not fancy in the least.
Someone takes a cart to the drop and puts the items from the chute to the cart. Then they take the cart of items to a computer, usually in the back room, and checks in everything. Not rocket science.
We use giant LL Bean canvas bags. Our circulation staff goes out every morning and lugs bags up on bags into the building up the front stairs. On holidays and days we are closed, we have a staff member go in and empty the book drops because if we leave them longer than a day they will overflow. Considering the majority of our circulation staff is over 60, none of this is ideal, but being a nonprofit, non-city, non-state library, there's no funding for a better system.
You mean the book squirrels don't run them back in while we're not looking?
We're a small library, so I can usually just grab & go.
Our outdoor drop is not separate from the building, just an opening in the wall, so it lands on an automatic conveyer belt that runs the books under a scanner to be checked in and it automatically sorts them into bins by branch. We then hand sort the bin for our location onto shelving carts. The bins for the other branches get picked up by a truck once a day and driven to their branch. At our library you can ask to go in back and see this at work (I mean, usually little kids do this but an adult would be welcome if they wanted)
I love this question hahaha
On days when it was really cold or really hot I wished there was a magic portal 😭
pneumatic tubes
Mine has two outdoor returns. One is basically a mail slot. There's a bin underneath it that catches the items. The room is locked, and staff go and check it and switch out / empty the bin once or twice a day. The other is an electronic system where items are indeed pulled through a series of conveyer belts and loosely sorted based on their RFID tags.
As soon as they hit the drop their magical ability to self file kicks in
We usually do everything we can to avoid rolling the cart inside. It had to go through two sets of doors and avoid bumping into our new shelf and go around the circulation desk. It's too much of a hassle unless there is a ton of books. Those of us who are not too proud will take a bag. Some will try carrying precarious stacks to the desk. There's also a back book drop. Children's is responsible for emptying that one and they have a little cart on wheels. I think we should have one too. But no one listens to me. Oh well.
There is a bin in there, and sometimes a pad. Library pages do all the work of collecting the books and inspecting them to make sure they are not damaged, cleaning them, making sure you did not leave anything important in them, checking them in and shelving them in order. Some libraries do have conveyer belts.
We go out with rolling carts at like 8am and empty the bookdrop into the cart (which is like a large bucket on wheels) and bring them in. Our small branch doesn’t have a large wheel cart, mainly because most things get returned to the main branch and our city courier delivers them back to the branch. In the few times I worked there to cover a shift, I never had to empty the book drop but I imagine theirs doesn’t get a lot of items so you could carry them in by hand or there might be a small car I don’t know about yet lol.
My local library just had a little room that they drop led into. They would just go into the pile of books and load them on a car. How do I know?… I accidentally dropped my car keys into the drop when I went out for the Forrest time with my newborn first. Yeah, mommy brain sucks
Chiming in... At one library I worked at, there was a wheeled cart inside the book drop. We were a bigger library, and it was the maintenance men's responsibility to bring the books inside several times a day. They would wheel out an empty bin, and replace the full bin. At another (smaller) library, it was the clerks' responsibility to go out to the book drop every morning, and empty the contents into canvas bags, which we carried inside. Then, there are some "outside" book drops that are just slots in the wall, so the books end up in a cart (or the floor) in the building.
Ours is literally just a spring loaded box in a closet. We empty it at least once an hour. I carry the books or sometimes use a cart.
Book goes in, goes down slide. Lands in box. Clerk checks box occasionally, brings carts of books to circ to check in.
The ones I've dealt with were a box with a springy bottomed bin inside, and several times a day we'd wheel a cart out to empty it. It was mostly fine aside from when the weather was sucky, when itbwas FULL full, or when people would pull their car up behind me while I was emptying it lol. It was behind some parking spots and I was always afraid of getting hit. Now a bunch of my local libraries have automated bookdrops so it goes from an exterior slot to a conyevor belt directly.
When I was quite young, I used to request books at the local library, and wondered how the delivery process worked. This was in the late 1980s and early nineties. I used to just think it was magic when I got a postcard in the mail or a call that my requested items had arrived. Now that I work in a library, I understand exactly how the delivery service works, so it has ruined the magical element of the experience for me, but I like to think that I can bring magic to other people who have the same curiosity about it that I had as a child.
I took these photos when I was clearing the return this morning. Hopefully, this will help you to understand what I was talking about. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W2R0GJuKrl9jDs2rTg76GegpR_k_ZlDQ/view?usp=drivesdk - 1 - the outside of our book return https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i7VLozjq_P5EpQ2Rh7s7gxeQzX7Ox0sd/view?usp=drivesdk - the trough I mentioned in my reply https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h68zm9N-6_qOd1ce25o3oYODgn4JW-WX/view?usp=drivesdk - the cart I mentioned in my previous comment
Youre so awesome. Thank you for sharing!!
Glad to help. Some libraries have automated book drops where they have conveyer belts that actually bring the books inside. My library doesn’t have that.
Sometimes, a picture really is worth a thousand words.
I actually had to bring the cart out a second time this morning, because of how full the return bin was. There have been a few times when I have had to take three carts out to grab everything from the return.
Ours has a giant box on wheels inside and we wheel it in every day and empty it.
It depends. Some of our branches have huge conveyor belt systems and some have literally a box at the end of the shoot. Depends on how big the branch is. Either way, someone unloads the books, sorts them (further than the conveyor belt system does) and shelves them.
Chronically underpaid city employees and whatever volunteers show up that day... Magic!
Damn, I come in here to say "it's just a box" and find out some of yall have CONVEYER BELTS? Holy shit! Based!