Improving Staff Onboarding

For part-time library staff, memorizing the stacks can take several months. We spoke with Michelle Yule, Head of Collections at West Vancouver Memorial Library, about how StackMap is helping new and part-time staff members get the lay of the land more quickly and avoid those awkward moments when they don’t know where a book is but would still like to assist patrons as best they can.

StackMap just makes life easier for the staff members who are not here all the time. If you’re not working very often, it probably takes at least six months to not go to the wrong place for certain collections that aren’t intuitive. Especially in the last two years, we did some reconfiguration and we couldn’t have the call number range go in perfect order anymore. With StackMap, that’s not really an issue, and staff can quickly take a look at the app and see what area they need to go to. 

From both the patron side and the staff side, it just makes your experience at the library more seamless. It definitely saves staff time and also saves them from awkward patron situations when they’re helping them find a book. It can be so awkward when you’re new, and you don’t know where something is because it feels like that’s supposed to be your one job! But it’s not necessarily an intuitive skill. For staff using BiblioCommons, they don’t have to take the patron to multiple places to find the books they’re looking for. They can just look in StackMap and go straight there.  

-Michelle Yule, Head of Collections at West Vancouver Memorial Library