Books in Transit: The Logistics of Library Book Movement

Abstract

In 2015 RMIT University commenced a two-year building redevelopment project which included completely refurbishing the main library. Approximately 180,000 books were temporarily moved to off-site storage and this posed the challenge of how to manage a working collection so that there would be minimal impact on the university’s students and staff still requiring ‘just in time’ access. In preparation, the library implemented a two-year project to enable it to continue to provide high-level services for the duration of the construction work. This paper considers if logistics processes could be applied to mitigate any access issues caused by off-site storage of library resources.

Keywords:

• Academic libraries
• collection movement
• logistics
• off-site storage
• service levels

Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge the RMIT Library executive staff, branch manager and the operational staff who were interviewed for this investigation.

Copyright statement

This research has not been published elsewhere and has not been submitted simultaneously for publication elsewhere.