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Shelving staff (especially in academic libraries)

Posted May 19th, 2008 by Kelly McKeon
Do you employ shelving staff?

If you are an academic library - do you employ students as shelvers?

Very basic library tasks like shelving and book covering take up a large amount of our time at NAS and I'm interested in how other libraries cope with this issue.

I think a little bit of shelving is good for everyone, to ensure staff know the collection, but the volume here is high and we are expensive shelvers.

Do other libraries have library assistants for this work, is it divided up among staff of various levels, or do you employ casual shelvers at a rate lower than library assistants?

I would be grateful for any input - please leave your comments here in the forum by clicking "Add new comment" below (so others can benefit) or email me directly if your comments are confidential (click on my name above, then click Contact).

Many thanks
Kelly
National Art School
‹ Acceptance of donations Library Management Systems for Small Art Libraries ›

SHELVING

On August 15th, 2008 Barbara Rendall said:
There has always been a very high volume of shelving here at Design Centre. There is an equivvalent full time staff of three. We all do shelving on a daily basis and do the task throughout the day to ensure it does not build up. We also each have a section to shelf tidy and division of the collection is based on hours worked per week. The section assigned changes each term- which means that we all get the opportunity to become familiar with different sections.

Shelving staff

On August 13th, 2008 margaret blackmore said:
Hi Kelly,

UNSW uses a lot of student shelvers - I find it hard to imagine how the shelving could possibly be done without them. The drawback that we have though is that (for IR reasons) we are unable to employ each student for more than 12 months. So it means that each year we are training new students and we also are unable to retain the exceptionally good ones. For the last year or so, we have also employed Library Attendants, who work for 21 hours per week and are at the at HEW1 level. Their pay is similar to student assistants but these staff are permanent part-time, so get sick pay etc. The benefit of Library Attendants is that the training given can be better utilised, over a longer period. We often get part-time students applying for these jobs, or people who, for whatever reason, only want part-time hours. There tends to be a quite high turn-over. But it is likely that this would be less so in a smaller library.
If you would like any other information - I am happy to provide it.

Margaret

Shelving at QUT Kelvin Grove

On May 26th, 2008 Ellen Thompson said:
I asked our Shelving Supervisor for some info ion how KG does it - and here are his answers to Kelly's questions:

Do you employ shelving staff?

At present we do not employ shelving staff per se. We employ Lending Services Assistant's who undertake a variety of lending services duties of which one duty is shelving.

If you are an academic library - do you employ students as shelvers?

We are an academic library and at present we do not employ student shelvers. However, future workforce planning suggests that this is a direction the library will go down at some stage in the future (i.e. employing student shelvers at a level below our existing HEWA3 lending assistants to solely conduct shelving). This is a more cost-effective approach to shelving.

Very basic library tasks like shelving and book covering take up a large amount of our time at NAS and I'm interested in how other libraries cope with this issue.

Shelving does take up a great deal of our Lending Assistants time. We have approx 90-100 hours of lending staffing per week day and of this 20-30 hours a day is allocated to shelving practices.

I think a little bit of shelving is good for everyone, to ensure staff know the collection, but the volume here is high and we are expensive shelvers. Do other libraries have library assistants for this work, is it divided up among staff of various levels, or do you employ casual shelvers at a rate lower than library assistants?

Our Library Assistants are the only staff to conduct shelving. Generally speaking each Library Assistant will have between 2-3 hours of shelving per day (pro rata for part time staff). With the number of Lending Assistants we have this would roughly equal about 20+ shelving hours/day. Furture workforce planning for see's that shelving will be conducted by student shelver’s employed at a HEWA2 level below our Lending Assistants (who are employed at HEWA3).

Shelving

On May 19th, 2008 Christine Roberts said:
We are a library with three staff in total. Our lowest level staff member (Library Technician level) is responsible for shelving daily; this takes about one hour. However, when we have work placement students or occasional volunteers they do the shelving, which helps them to find their way around the collection quickly.

re:

On May 20th, 2008 Laura Manchester said:
I don't know how much help this will be.
I work in an academic library, but it's a fairly small one. I'm a qualified librarian and the only staff member here, so I do all the shelving and shelf checking myself. It takes about an hour a week for shelving and if I really get the shelves into the proper order it would be about two - three hours of shelf checking. I'm not as conscientious as I could be about shelf checking though. Having only worked here for three months, I'm certainly getting to know the collection much more quickly than I would otherwise!