Reengineering storage logistics

摘要

The University at Albany investigated process improvements for transferring or withdrawing large numbers of books from its stacks. Based on this investigation, this article offers best practices and processes, including finding efficiencies in workflow and implementing ILS batch processing of Excel worksheets containing record metadata, rather than individual processing of titles. Other suggested best practices are a variant of cross-docking, where the processed materials are removed from the shelf to a truck, the barcode scanned into a comma-delimited file for batch processing, and materials directly discarded or transported to storage for immediate shelving, depending on planned final disposition.