Episode 2. Handling Returns: Will book-drop work?

Jun Maeda
Hokkaido University Library

1. Introduction

In Hokkaido University Central Library, users had to come to the circulation desk for returning books before 2019. To save users’ time, the Central Library started to consider opening book-drop at the entrance for 24-hour basis.
This episode shows how the library estimated the amount of return books and placed a regular pick-up routine to prevent overflow of books with minimum labour cost.

2. Method

Loan data of returning books, e.g., return time and date, are derived from library management system (LMS) to analyse monthly, daily, and hourly returns. We also used entrance gate data and loan data to clarify the entrance objectives of users, e.g., loan, return, and stay. This analysis provided hourly user dynamics as to when users come to library to do what.

3. Results

3.1 Monthly return
The number of returning books peaks in early August, late December, and early February, which corresponds to the start of summer vacation, New Year (NY) vacation, and spring vacation, respectively (Figure 1). 

The maximum number of returns reached 1287 books during the NY holidays. The absolute number of returns peaks around 1000~1200 during NY holidays, so this would be the maximum capability of handling the book-drops.
Spring semester and Autumn semester has similar variation which gradually increases the number of returns followed by a steep drop prior to the vacation. Autumn semester has two more peaks with over 1000 returns caused by NY holidays. G.W. stands for national holidays called Golden Week in early May.

3.2 Daily return
Daily return shows clear peak in the Monday and decreases as the days go by (Figure 2). 

It can be summarised that there is a huge demand for weekdays than weekends.

3.3 Hourly return
Hourly returns are analysed with stacked value of months of June, July, and August (Figure 3, left panel). Returns peak at 16, followed by 14, 12 and 10 (LT). These hours correspond to break time between the lectures. The maximum number of returns is ~140 around 12 (LT) shown by an analysis of one-month data of July (Figure 3, right panel).

3.4 Entrance purpose
The number of entrance, book loan, and book returns allow us to roughly estimate the entrance purpose of users at that time (Figure 4). 

Book returns peaks at 10, 12 and 14 LT with higher average than that of loans in the morning period. In contrast, the number of book loans grows with constant number of user entrance in the afternoon.

4. Discussion

The results show that maximum hourly and daily returns are 120 and 1200 books, respectively. Thus, we set these values as handling limit for book-drop management. 2.5 hourly collection from book-drop at 10, 12, 14, 16 (LT) are added as new routine work for circulation staffs. Instead, the hourly returns at the circulation desk decreases.
Entrance purpose analysis shows that users come to library to return books in the morning and borrow books in the afternoon. Some stay in the library possibly for their study in the afternoon to late evening.

5. Conclusions

Now we can answer to the question “Will book-drop work?” as follows:

・Yes. It saves time of uses as well as reduces workloads of circulation staffs especially in the afternoon of weekdays and weeks prior to the star of semesters.

and book-drop needs to be,

・Capable of >100 books
・Cleared by 2.5 hours interval

Since 2019, the book-drop has been open and operated without any issues.

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Header image from Pexels by Alina Vilchenko

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