One More Thing...Josie

I also attended a workshop on Collection Management and mostly the discussion was about floating collections. Many libraries through out the country (and probably world) are doing this very effectively. A floating collection is where a library does not have ownership of items, but receive their collection based on patron requests. The collection floats around based on what is being requested at a particular branch. I see many benefits to this, the main benefit is to the environment. It greatly decreases the amount of delivery, which really saves on transportation costs, which impacts pollution and our use of fossil fuels. Since it decreases deliveries, LA's spend significantly less time processing bins. The draw backs that I see are, collections must be constantly be shifted and patrons that know how to work the system will WORK IT. My main worry is that people who know how to use our hold system will create an awesome library for themselves and their neighborhood, where as people who don't know how to use our hold system or are less proactive will end up with the old and ugly books. A solution to this would be to only float popular items, such as dvds, cds and popular fiction. In essence, the things that take up the most space in our bins. This is a pretty hot issue right now, does anyone else have any thoughts on this?