"People deserve a clean, good collection. And that's what we always work towards - that great patron experience."
Library technology has advanced a lot in recent years. You may remember that prior to 2020 books were checked out by scanning their individual barcodes while these days you can set a stack of materials down at our checkout stations to check them out all out once. Behind the scenes, we've added automated sorting machines to get items where they are going as fast as possible. Lately, you may have noticed staff walking around the library with cell phones scanning library materials. We aren't checking them out, although you can also do that with your own phone and the TRLGo app. No, these are our IMMS phones! IMMS is a new technology that stands for Intelligent Material Management System. IMMS helps us with...a lot. I'll explore some of the most exciting things below, but, to sum it up, the point of IMMS is to help library staff curate the best possible experience for you.
TRL is a big library system. What's popular in Ocean Park may not be as interesting to folks 178 miles away in Packwood and vice versa. Of course, while any item in the catalog can be placed on hold and delivered to another library, the reality is that most of what users borrow from the physical collection comes from people browsing our shelves, and not holds alone. To give visitors across the library district an opportunity to discover new books, DVDs and other items, IMMS constantly rotates material that hasn’t been checked out for a while at one library and sends it to another. The "intelligent" part of IMMS is that it knows how much of each type of material we should have on hand based on local trends and sends us what we need. If a lot of mysteries are being requested or checked out at a particular branch, IMMS will send more mysteries when they are returned to other libraries. This helps keep our collections fresh, which is especially important in smaller branches with less shelf space. It also knows where each item in our collection is at any given time – almost like tracking the Amazon package you’ve been anxiously awaiting. So when we're low on mushroom hunting books more are on the way (just kidding, they're all checked out)!
Prior to going live with this new technology, much of the data crunching was still possible but it was much, much slower. These days, over half of our checkouts each year are digital and our collection is approximately proportional as well. With fewer physical items in the library it's important to try and make discovery as easy as possible with shelves that are neither too empty nor too full. In a recent podcast episode, also titled "What the Heck is IMMS?" our Library Services Director explains that, "People deserve a clean, good collection. And that's what we always work towards - that great patron experience." IMMS gives staff the tools to give our communities the healthiest, most appealing collection possible in each of our libraries. We hope you agree!
And we're not done yet. There are many cool features we haven't "turned on" yet so stay tuned in the months ahead for even more exciting changes. If you'd like to dig even deeper into IMMS and the (surprisingly exciting) world of library collection management check out the podcast link below.
