Materials Handling Center

This Valentine’s Day, we would like to send a love letter to Central Library’s Clerical Operations team – the heart and literal circulation system of this building.

Our clerks staff the check-out and return desks in the Grand Lobby and the Popular Library on the mezzanine. They are likely the people that handed you your library card and welcomed you to BPL when you first became a member, who help you check out or renew your books, and who sometimes help you settle library fines and fees. Our clerks are always happy to give you directions or answer whatever questions you might have.

The clerical team is also responsible for the complex circulation operation that goes on behind the scenes as books are returned, placed on hold and travel across Brooklyn to one of our 58 other locations to be delivered to their next reader. After you hit that little green “hold” button on our catalog, or place a book in our book drop, our dedicated Clerical Operations team goes to work getting that book pulled off the shelf, re-shelved or sent to another library to fulfill a hold requested for pickup there. At Central Library, our collections circulate over 1.6 million times each year. Our Clerical Operations team ensures that hundreds of thousands of books are retrieved from or returned to their proper, Dewey Decimal-assigned place across Central’s many, many miles of shelving. If you are at Central Library and request books from the “decks,” our underground book storage levels, the clerical staff will retrieve them within 15-20 minutes. Last year alone they fulfilled over 180,000 holds requests, and mailed out about 50,000 library cards to Brooklynites who applied for a library card online.

As you can imagine, having an efficient space to do that work is important. Our clerical staff need space to unpack and process the dozens of boxes of books that are delivered to Central from branch libraries each day, space for the hundreds of book trucks we use to pre-sort and carry materials to the shelves, and work stations where we process the books that have been sent from, or need to be delivered or returned to, other locations.

Here’s a peek at what our current space looks like on a typical morning as a crew works to get that day’s holds ready to shelve:

A new Materials Handling Center will help our Clerical Operations team perform these essential library operations in a more efficient manner, which means our patrons will have their holds filled quicker and returned books shelved faster.

So what will happen to the space you see above? It’s the future site of our new Civic Commons, which just so happens to be the subject of our next blog post. Stay tuned!