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Thursday, July 28, 2011

The story of a new book at the ORL

Have you ever wondered how the regional library system operates? Where do all the books and materials come from, how are they shipped between all the branches, and who deals with the hundreds of thousands of materials added to the collection each year?

The ORL Administration Centre on KLO Road in Kelowna acts as the central hub for the library system. This is where the Acquisitions team works to order new items and unpacks them as they arrive. Every item goes through Cataloguing and Processing to be added to the online catalogue, barcoded, stamped and labelled, and perhaps wrapped for protection. The Allocations team then distributes, and redistributes, and continues to redistribute items to the branches as requests are placed. Vans pick up boxes of books, movies and more nine times per week to deliver them to a branch near you.

The Adminstration Centre also has offices for financial accounting, human resources, and computer services, as well as the servers which run the online catalogue and manage Internet at hundreds of staff and public use computers throughout the ORL region. For a peek into these inner workings of the ORL’s hub, check out this Administration Centre virtual tour.