What’s Going on Behind the Shelves: The Hidden Work of Library Staff

We’re All Adults Here

Book Recommendations & Other Musings

by Carol Tuttle

What’s going on behind the shelves?

When you stop by one of our libraries, there are friendly staff in the building who make your visit pleasant and easy. However, your experience at a WEPL library is also supported by a lot of hidden work. Before you even arrived at the building, several WEPL staff have made sure the books/movies/music/games are available for you. The team of Materials and Processing (MAP) Department and the Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Dept. have been busy behind the shelves!

The team of WEPL selection librarians is continuously filling online “shopping carts” with upcoming new books, music and movies to be purchased. These virtual carts are transferred to the Materials and Processing staff, who organize the cart information, place the orders with our supplier, and enter the costs into the library financial software. When the delivery boxes of new books, movies, music and games arrive at the Administrative offices at Eastlake City Hall, the MAP Department staff cross-check the invoices to be sure the shipments are correct and lets the fiscal office know  payments can be made to the vendors. Then comes the work of adding protective book covers, item barcodes and genre stickers, and entering each item’s information onto the correct record in the catalog. These freshly processed new items are placed in bins for each of our four buildings and delivered by our WEPL van.

All items pulled in from other Clevnet libraries for your holds (more than 1000 items a day!) are received and sorted by the two ILL Department staff, placed in bins for each of our four buildings, and delivered by our WEPL van. Building Circulation staff set these reserved items aside for you to pick up. Whew! All this hidden work is coordinated to bring the books/movies/music/games to you as soon as possible.

Carol Tuttle is the Collection Services Librarian for the Willoughby-Eastlake Library System. She  is currently reading The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer by Charles Graeber.

This month, there are several brand-new biographies by famous entertainers that may interest you:

Find This Title at the Library:

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