To Float or Not to Float by Noel Rutherford

Banyoles, Pla de l'Estany, Girona, Spain.. [Photography]. Retrieved from Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. 
https://quest.eb.com/search/137_3143344/1/137_3143344/cite

DiBello, Amy

Rutherford, N. (2016). To float or not to float? Inside Nashville PL's examination of the method's performance. Library Journal, 141(6), 46.

To float? Or not to float? 

That is the question for many public libraries.
Whether 'tis nobler in each branch to suffer sacrificing precious shelf space to accommodate too many copies of certain titles or to have each branch possess their own copy.

Noel Rutherford is a collection development and acquisitions manager at the Nashville Public Library. Her article discusses her library system's float experience, which follows in the footsteps of many libraries who have "floated" their collections to decrease hold transit time and add variety to their collections without purchasing more books. A patron driven collection was another objective of implementing floating, along with the hopes for increased circulation statistics.

As a paraprofessional who works in a public library with a floating collection, I have a ton of opinions on floating collections. I am anti-float and cling fiercely to my biases. However, I'll be keeping my $00.02 on this topic until I read a few more articles about the pros and cons of float. 

Tulsa City County Library Aims to Manage Floating Collection with New Decision Center Module

Casso, Gillian

Tulsa City County Library Aims to Manage Floating Collection with New Decision Center Module

Enis, M. (2013). Tulsa city county library aims to manage floating collection with new decision center module. Library Journal. Retrieved from  http://www.thedigitalshift.com/2013/10/acquisition/tulsa-city-county-library-aims-to-manage-floating-collection-with-new-decision-center-module/

 Summary:
This article describes the new floating collections module at Tulsa City County Library. This program, Decision Center helps users manage floating collections across multiple branches, anticipate demand for new titles and how many of these should be purchased. This program also includes a popular authors feature. This will make it easier for branches to determine which books could be moved to other libraries based on the amount of copies currently at the library. This will save staff time as they would no longer have to look at each book to determine if it could be sent to another branch or not. Decision Center has also analyzed trends and looks at collection size, usage and with this data they can try to make sure the collections are optimally sized for the separate locations and the interests of the particular neighborhoods.

Evaluation:
I find floating collections fascinating and in fact we have a floating collection of large type books at the library I work for. I think that by constantly have new materials for our patrons benefits the library and our patrons. No longer do we have to ship this collection to the owning libraries and since it is such a small collection, patrons constantly have something new to read. Before we switched this collection to a floating collection, patrons were constantly going to different libraries because they had run out of materials to read at their library. I believe that this is great service to patrons if it works well. We were going to do the same type of floating collection with our DVD collection, but found out that there is glitch in the program. If a library has too many of one title it is suppose to trap the item for another library instead of having it stay at the library it was dropped off at, but that service doesn't work. Since our DVD collection is quite large we could end up with 6 copies of one title while another library may have none.