Delays in the collection of library reservations
Helsinki City Library’s central system for sorting materials will be upgraded on Thursday, 18 February and Friday, 19 February. The upgrade will cause an interruption in the use of the system, so delivering reserved items to customers will take slightly longer than usual.
The central sorting system is located in the main library’s shipping room in Pasila. It handles the materials transported between the various locations of Helsinki City Library as well as the reserved materials sent from Helsinki to other libraries in the metropolitan area and vice versa.
Due to the service interruption, reserved materials will be available for collection later than usual at all HelMet libraries in Helsinki, Espoo, Kauniainen and Vantaa.
During the interruption, software updates will be made and the mechanical components of the system replaced. These procedures are part of the system’s normal maintenance.
– At the moment, 14,000 items, on average, pass through the sorting system every weekday. The machine sorts them into boxes, which are then taken to the libraries, says Satu Holmberg, Project Manager at Helsinki City Library.
While the sorting system is unavailable, the books, magazines and other materials will wait for processing in boxes in the main library’s shipping room.
– When the processing starts again, the reservations will be processed first, meaning that they will bypass the other materials. Despite this, it will take over a week to restore the situation back to normal due to the large number of reserved and other items. To ensure that people won’t need to wait unreasonably long for the books they have reserved, we’ll also be sorting materials over the weekend following the upgrade, Holmberg says.
Text: Sari Lehikoinen
Photo: Helsinki City Library