Making our stock work harder

We have the best part of a third of a million items in our libraries, most of which are available for loan by our borrowers. We try to have a wide range of stock available for loan in each library but:

• There's only so much you can physically fit on the shelves;
• We couldn't afford to buy a copy of everything for every library;
• We couldn't justify buying a copy of everything for everywhere — there are limited markets for some authors and subjects and there's no point in buying books just to have them sitting stagnant on the shelves forever.

Part of the traditional management of stock in our libraries involves the manual transfer of stock between libraries — if a book's in a good state but seems to have exhausted the local market we move it on to another library. This is a good way of trying to make stock earn its keep but it's a time-consuming business. Over the past few years we've been looking at developing new systems to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our stock management.

A few years ago we launched the first of our Featured Collections: small circulating collections which will periodically move from library to library. The aims of the collections are:

• To increase the variety of stock available at branch libraries;
• To introduce more authors and genres to customers at branch libraries; and
• To create the opportunity to experiment and test the market for new ideas in our libraries.

The collections proved to be remarkably successful:

• The collections' rotating between libraries stopped them getting stale: they were moved on before customers got bored with them.
• Customers at small branch libraries got to see specialist non-fiction, new authors and genre fiction that were usually the preserve of the main libraries.
• We could tie featured collections in to events and activities in the libraries.
• The stock issued well, sometimes surprisingly well at some libraries.
• Anecdotal evidence suggests that the "otherness" of the featured collections may have highlighted the new stock that was being bought anyway and encouraged more use of "ordinary" collections at some libraries.

This experience encouraged us to invest in an automatic stock rotation system for our library management system. This lets us pre-programme a sequence of transfers into each item so that it's moved on periodically. Depending on the type of item, after so many months or issues staff the system tells staff where it needs to go next. New large print stock was the first to be subject to the new system and nearly a year on we're seeing the effects on the issue figures — between 25% and 116% more than this time last year. We're steadily increasing the range of materials that are being added to this system (colleagues elsewhere who had pioneered this system advised us to avoid the problems they'd had by not trying to do a 'big bang' implementation). Items being moved on by the stock rotation system show the status "Transfer/Rotation" on the Catalogue.

The third development involved the possibilities provided by the Web Catalogue and a change in charging policy for reservations. Having all of our libraries on the one circulation system with customers being able to see all the stock in all our libraries on the Catalogue means that for all intents and purposes every library has access to a stock of a third of a million items. They may not all be on view on the shelves but they're available in the same way the the reserve stock we hold backstage is available. If we let borrowers at Alkrington Library, say, reserve a book on the shelves at Littleborough Library free of charge then there wouldn't necessarily be any need to have a copy of that book at Alkrington. This means that instead of buying five copies of a book on papercrafts we could buy single copies of five books on papercrafts, with a good chance that somebody borrowing one of them might want to borrow one of the others.

Council gave permission for us to remove the reservation fee on items in stock or on order at the beginning of the year. Since free reservations were launched on 3rd February we have seen a three-fold increase in the number of online reservations and smaller but, still significant, increases in the number of in-library reservations. We're starting to see some impact in our statistics: issue figures are generally looking healthy, with some collections showing significant increases in use at some libraries. It's also apparent that some of our customers are using our libraries more than usual: they're browsing the Catalogue at home, reserving the items they want to borrow and nipping in to pick them up when it's convenient. This is also very obvious from our reservation statistics: two-thirds of our reservations are filled within a few days of their being placed.

Progress so far is encouraging but there is still much more to do. We've established that a policy involving featured collections and automatic rotation helps to keep the stock refreshed and allows a broader range of materials to be on display for loan in our libraries. We've also established that letting our customers browse and choose online and pick up from their local library at their convenience encourages more use of our stock and probably helps address some of the need of time-poor customers. We know we need to do more work on the marketing and promotion of our stock; we're currently working on a marketing plan as part of the Library Service's overall service planning for the next three years.