Case Story: Varde Library

From No Experience to Full Ownership at Varde Library

When Varde Library set out to bring their new Lyngsoe Sort Mate™ 2000 into operation, they had no prior experience with automated material handling. Instead, they took it upon themselves to learn everything they possibly could about the system through a close collaboration with the Lyngsoe team. Now the system has become something both staff and patrons have made their own.

About the Library

Varde Library is the main library in Varde Municipality, serving around 50,000 residents together with four branch libraries spread across a large and largely rural municipality. The library is housed in an older building in the center of town, near the old town hall, which set natural limits on how much space was available for the new sorting system.

Learning It From The Ground Up

When Varde Library bought an automated sorter from Lyngsoe Library Systems, they had no experience with sorting systems. After the tender and specifications process were settled, they hired a dedicated project manager, Anja Brink, to handle the implementation. Being new to both the library world and the Cicero library management system, it mattered to her and to the library, that they learned the system themselves and understood how to work it in the future.

Even before the system was delivered, the process called for close collaboration with Lyngsoe. Ahead of installation, a series of checklists had to be completed, but no one in-house could readily make sense of exactly what information was needed.

“None of my colleagues at the library could tell me which data model our RFID tags used. So I ended up manually sending some tags by mail to Jeppe [project manager at Lyngsoe], so he could check the data model. It was a big help,” Anja Brink explains.

When it came to installing the sorter with two patron-facing return kiosks and 15 destinations split between Lyngsoe Ergo Carts™ and Lyngsoe Ergo Bins™, she and the staff at Varde kept the same approach of reaching out and asking rather than guessing. This led to Anja Brink partnering up with Lyngsoe’s service technician, Morten Knudsen, for the week he was on site installing the sorter.

"I stuck close to Morten the whole week he was here, because I needed to learn everything from the ground up and see how he had built it,“ Anja Brink adds. “I also took part in both standard training sessions and the super-user training Morten gave, so I could do the training whenever we've had new employees, or when someone returns from vacation or parental leave.”

That hands-on knowledge and training combined with a user-friendly system has also helped ease the nerves for colleagues who don’t use the sorter often. As Anja Brink explains, it's hard to get anything wrong in the first place:

"What I like about the system is that you can't press the wrong thing. If the cart doesn't release, just try another button. You can't break anything."

A Successful Implementation

A successful rollout depends on more than the technician's work alone. For a library like Varde Library with no previous experience in automated material handling, a great deal comes down to change management. Moving from manual handling to automated book sorting requires changes in both workflows and mindsets. For that reason, it was important to Anja Brink to keep her colleagues informed throughout the project:

“As a trained project manager, I also know about change management, so it's been really important to me that my colleagues felt informed along the way. I've sent out emails almost weekly, with info about which tradespeople are coming to the building, on which days and what they're doing. So the colleagues who needed to could read along, and I think it's given a basic understanding that things are under control. It's definitely been time-consuming, but I think it's been worth it,” Anja Brink says.

The same concern for the library staff also ended up shaping how the library approached going live just before Easter. The sorter was still new to the staff, and since the library isn't staffed over the holidays, it was agreed to run the old and new systems in parallel through the Easter break. That gave staff room to test the new system on a smaller scale while making sure patrons could still return their materials without issues if anything went wrong.

Up and Running and All Their Own

Once the sorter was up and running, Varde Library stayed in close contact with Lyngsoe. After a few weeks, the staff noticed that certain materials were getting stuck in one of the two return kiosks. This meant another visit from Morten Knudsen who came back to take a closer look. Since he had installed the sorter himself, he quickly traced the issue to a height mismatch and adjusted it on site.

With everything running smoothly, patrons got a say in the sorter, too. A glass wall built into the system lets people watch their books move through it, and Varde Library invited patrons to help name the machine. Today, it goes by Sortea, complete with a short story written about it, and the sorter has turned out to be an unexpected favorite among the youngest visitors.

What's Next

Varde Library is already planning the next steps for the system, including dedicated discharge points for children's Christmas materials. Sorting of reservations is planned to be split into “Reservations for pickup in the library” and “Reservations leaving the library”. The changes will only be rolled out once the library has had time to gather data on current operations, an approach that reflects the same thoroughness that shaped the entire implementation.