I never thought the day would come when we were running out of materials to shelve at Ivy. But at the pace the crew is working, it is hard to constantly feed the machine. We have about 900 boxes of stuff delivered to Ivy every Thursday. During the first several weeks we would still have boxes to process when the next shipment came in. These days we get through the usual number by late Tuesday. Up until now we had some boxes from our Business, Law, and Health Sciences libraries stashed down one of the aisles to get to when we could (which I thought might be next Spring). But we have gotten through most of that. So, I need to figure out an accelerated delivery schedule. We have a large surplus of boxes of items in Alderman Library that are ready to go to Ivy (i.e. bar-coded and sorted) we just need to figure out a way to get them to Ivy. And if that is the toughest challenge I have, then that ain't bad. I think the solution will involve a truck.
We have now accessioned 332,085 items into Ivy using 19,616 trays. That is 3 months work, so my goal of 100,000/month is well on track. My fantasy of 120,000/month has fallen a bit short, but that's why I call it a fantasy. And while the guys at Ivy can see every day the fruits of their labor, a big shout out needs to go to the Interlibrary Services staff in Alderman who are folding those thousand of trays, attaching a handle, applying a label, and bundling them up for transport. It takes a village. A large village.
