Case Story: Helsinki City Libraries

The implementation

Satu Holmberg, IMMS™ project manager tells that when the decision to adopt IMMS™ was finally made, things had to go very quickly indeed as Oodi was scheduled to be opened in late 2018.

However, the necessary Sierra integration had to be done first and the actual implementation started in late September 2018. The core implementation group consisted of 3 people (=2 FTE) covering cataloging, circulation services and logistics unit and a metadata librarian. The team size moved up and down due to time restraints and other duties, and right from the beginning, it was seen as important to involve staff from the local libraries.

As IMMS™ relies on knowledge of the physical layout of all the local libraries, right down to the amount of shelf space each library has, the 40 km of shelving across all the libraries had to be registered. Close collaboration with the local staff was important as it was also seen as an opportunity for training and knowledge sharing.

The entire registration was done in less than two months, and the speed didn’t leave much time to contemplate or do any testing to learn more about the system. Another large challenge was the fact that despite other branches being full of books, the new shelves at Oodi stood empty. Planning for the content distribution had to be done on paper and not from real life. To help fill the 5.2 km of shelves in Oodi there was put a stop to all weeding in the entire library system and some 20,000 new books were bought to put on the empty shelves.

With the opening of Oodi library visits quickly increased from 6.5 million a year, to over 9 million. This was managed with no increase in staffing levels. The staffing structure was changed from working in individual libraries to knowledge teams across branches and these big organizational changes required big staff meetings. This left very little time to disseminate information about IMMS™ to everybody.  However regular IMMS™ one-hour webinars for all staff have been implemented successfully.

With IMMS™ also came floating collections. For this to succeed there need to be space on the shelves and with irregular weeding practices and worries about throwing the last copy out weeding was slow and not very efficient.

Benefits

Very soon after the IMMS™ go live in May 2019 the smaller libraries were thrilled to discover they now had new and different items. However, some of the bigger libraries commented that they needed particular titles in their collections, not understanding that the items were doing what library books are supposed to do: circulating instead of sitting on the shelves.

In some libraries the shelves were *very* full at the beginning meaning that there was no space for the IMMS™ algorithm to assign new material. As a result, the library did not see any benefit of the floating collection. Better weeding practices were introduced, and this made room on the shelves so that IMMS™ could direct more new titles to fill the free space.

With IMMS™ implemented, weeding has become a lot simpler, the algorithm recommends only items where use goes below a set threshold, and as library policy is to always keep two copies, staff can be confident that the items on the weeding list will never be the last.

One of the biggest benefits right from the beginning was paperless processes and batch handling. Time spent on handling items for shelving was cut in half and the time spent on holds or reservations was cut from 30 minutes per box to 5 minutes. Given that Helsinki processes around 50,000 totes per year this released a huge amount of staff time.

Paperless holds have been well received by the patrons. During the first months the libraries had staff in the holds pick up area assisting the pubic, but it quickly became routine as the numbered shelves are intuitive and quick to use. A user can come to their branch, return books, and pick up a handful of holds all within a few minutes.

The libraries have started putting exhibitions close to reservation shelves to entice users to borrow more, to help staff Satu has made an IMMS inspiration menu of exhibitions to choose from. When a subject has been chosen IMMS™ will then direct the desired titles to the designated place and pull titles from across the entire library collections.