I promise this long winded explanation is going somewhere. Like the title says, I’m a desperate librarian who is now providing curbside service to book starved patrons. Unfortunately, our city has furloughed 70% of the staff and doesn’t understand the amount of work they are asking us to accomplish. The burden is making our normal jobs impossible and is resulting in serious disservices to the community – contracts falling through cracks, services we have paid for to help people find Jobs not published on our website, and the general inability to keep up with the volume of phone calls and emails requesting help.
Ultimately, we are being forced to run an extraordinarily inefficient curbside program. We are averaging, and this is probably generous, 16 minutes of labor to every car. This does not include the labor of staff members pulling holds, shelving, and returning calls and emails. This is strictly people dedicated to answering phones, processing materials as they get checked out, and running materials to cars for contactless delivery. Most of this time is wasted because people required to be at the ready – waiting. I have provided numerous options to increase efficiency and help us regain some time, but it just isn’t clicking with the powers that be. Hell, using a wireless barcode scanner to scan people’s barcodes instead of having 2 people waiting by the phones would save us 8 hours of labor a day. In any case, there are no bites for the simple fixes for some strange reason.
**Software Development Question:**
What would be the absolute easiest and best way for a scrub to focus his days. What environment, tools, software, platform, or anything could I direct my free time to towards create a simple curbside app. Functionality through Covid-19 is 100% the goal. I’ve gone down several rabbit holes and reached some almost ideas. I thought I almost had something simple made just using Microsoft Teams last night, but we’ll see if that leads anywhere.
I’m open to web apps, hosted on our server or not, creating a simple DROID/IOS app (I have no idea what the requirements to get something onto these stores are), utilizing CHEAP API services, or any number of things. I just need to choose the right path.
At the most simple level.
– Something that a patron manually presses to send us a message that someone with Librarycard# has arrived and ideally which parking spot they are in 1-10. An automated/or not response could be sent back indicating we are on our way.
We are dealing with a lot of elderly patrons who are more comfortable with making a phone call than dealing with apps or phone browsers, but if it was made simple enough I think we could persuade them to use it just to help us out and make the process smoother for them.
Honestly, if it was a big red button that sent a 14 digit number to a google sheet that said I’m here! It would help alleviate hours of work. If I could get my hands on all of my patrons phones and save a browser link to a google form, it would work. Unfortunately, they’re far less likely to want to open their browsers and figure out the link to the google sheet, type in a long number and hope that we receive it.
At a slightly less simple level, it could be similar to other curbside apps. 2 buttons! Librarycard# is on their way and secondly that they’ve arrived.
Slightly more advanced features that’d be great would be automatic notifications for patrons based on GPS. I know Rakuten has a service called ARRIVED that might be a part of this question, but I have only done surface level investigation on like 50 different things
Lastly and least important would be something that authenticates the users barcode with our actual integrated library system, maybe it saves it, maybe it doesnt.
Where should I focus my energy? Any advice would be greatly appreciated and welcome.
I’m sorry you had to read all that…
Anonymous Librarian
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