{"id":707,"date":"2019-07-17T13:15:41","date_gmt":"2019-07-17T12:15:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/libstaff\/?p=707"},"modified":"2019-07-17T13:15:41","modified_gmt":"2019-07-17T12:15:41","slug":"the-wiley-warehouse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/libstaff\/archives\/707","title":{"rendered":"The Wiley warehouse"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Clare Playforth<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve recently had an exciting visit to the Wiley European\nDistribution Centre with the Society of Indexers and because I am kind and you\nare lucky I\u2019m going to share the experience here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Wiley warehouse is spread over a couple of units on an\nindustrial estate in Bognor Regis and after arriving at this glamourous\nlocation we were treated to pastries and coffee and a chat about the history of\nthe company: quite interesting. Then we donned our high vis and went on a 2.5\nhour tour of the warehouse: very interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

For those of you who might have missed your August 2013\nedition of Warehouse & Logistics News I found an excellent article where\nyou can see some pictures and get a sense of the scale of the operation http:\/\/warehousenews.co.uk\/2013\/08\/tgw-deliver-fully-integrated-automated-solution-to-wiley\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Think of it as a massive version of our book sorter and\ntrolley park plus the Content Delivery packing table and you will be about 1%\nof the way to imagining this \u201cfully integrated solution for the picking,\nhigh-speed sortation, packing and despatch of books\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are of course other parallels to be drawn between Wileys and library operations and it brought back a few happy memories of my time working in the East Sussex Bibliographic Services warehouse at Brooks Road in Lewes. Less happy was the reminder of how we later moved these offices and all the stock plus<\/em> the shelves themselves *shudders* to reassemble it all in the huge unit on the Diplocks Estate in Hailsham which we shared with the Schools Library Service and East Sussex Records Office. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whether we are talking about relocation, cleaning or\ncollection development it\u2019s easy to forget how all library logistics projects\nand stock moves are done under the umbrella of our classification schemes and\nthe collections that we\u2019ve curated. When planning the Bibliographic Services\nrelocation I had to make sure the books went back on the shelves crate by crate\nin Dewey order because when they are requested by users out in the branch\nlibraries it is the Dewey classification number that acts as the locator for\nthe book. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So we know that in libraries the aboutness of the book is\nhugely important to its location and to be honest it was fairly disconcerting\nto be somewhere like Wileys where the contents of the books meant nothing. The\nISBN is king here and it is a book\u2019s ISBN, along with its physical\ncharacteristics, that determines its fate. When moving through the automated\nsystems the massive chunky books will never drop on top of the flappy\npaperbacks lest they damage them. Colourful books or plastic wrapped books are\nseparated from their friends by the machines as their barcodes trouble the\nscanners. The conveyer belts sort the items and allocate the correct size of\nbox (either A,B,C or D) for the load. These boxes are fed flat packed into\nanother machine which magically assembles them beforehand. As the books shuffle\nalong the belts towards the human (yay!) packers, the first item covers a\nlittle sensor which tells the machine to stop moving lest the items spew out\nall over the floor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The warehouse has a terminology all of its own too which I\nfound weird and often charming. What I would call a crate in a library is a\n\u201ctote\u201d here. Where our books are \u201ccirculated\u201d in a library, here they move in\n\u201cwaves\u201d. Shelves are \u201cbins\u201d e.g. rolling stacks = \u201crolling bins\u201d and best of\nall they have a name for those irritating books that need extra help passing\nthrough the system \u2013 the oversized ones, the ones in cardboard sleeves,\nmultivolumes and the ones with CDs in them \u2013 these are called the \u201cuglies\u201d. I\neven saw a few copies of the behemoth that is Molecular Biology of the Cell on\nthe uglies shelf and I thought how some books are just sent to try distributers\nand library workers alike. A couple more delightful terms I learned: \u201cLittle\nDavid\u201d was a brand name for an automatic box taping machine, and \u201cLadypack\u201d was\na thing for shrink wrapping multivolume sets J<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everything is organised to make the operation function as\nefficiently as possible from receiving the cartons off the lorries to the\npacking of pallets for dispatch. Throughout the building on the shelves (sorry\nbins) the books are laid flat in piles ready for picking. There is not any\norder to the shelves, besides the least frequently picked items being on the\nbottom shelf. The lack of order is strange to me as a cataloguer and I think\nsome of the other indexers found it conceptually weird too. There were people\nwith hand held scanners collecting the books on trolleys and logging things on computer\nterminals at the end of the stacks. The system they were using looked like some\nkind of green screen that reminded me of an old LMS we used to run at East Sussex.\nThis system linked the books to their locations, orders and invoices through\ntheir ISBNs with no need for the staff to read a word of text on the item (such\nas authors or titles) which means human error is minimal and also opens up the\njob to people who don\u2019t have English as their first language. The various staff\non duty rotate around the different tasks, some packing, some on quality\ncontrol, some on returns – although women were notably absent from the fork\nlift area and all I could think about was Aliens and Ripley in her power loader\nsuit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The returns area had a load of books waiting to be pulped \u2013\nstandards are very high and they get all the amazon returns and damaged books\nthrough this area and, like a library, they have to weed out older editions of\nitems when new ones are published. Sadly the pulping happens off site so I\ndidn\u2019t get to do an Alan Partridge \u201cIT LOOKS LIKE PORRIDGE, WORD PORRIDGE!\u201d\nshout, which of course was my main reason for attending. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other reasons for attending were that I got to spend time with\nmy lovely colleagues from the Society of Indexers and have a good chat to them\nabout current projects and all the other things that cataloguers and indexers\nlike to gas about such as controlled vocabularies, metadata and the structure\nof websites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our tour guide Dave (no relation to the tape machine) was\nvery knowledgeable and had been there a long time so could explain what changes\nhad happened over the years in the book packaging and publishing trade. We\nlearnt a bit about print on demand and how there is nothing for people who like\nprint books to fear as print and ebook industries continue to work alongside\neach other with no indication that the latter will replace the former. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wiley have many different clients but the books I noticed\nmost whilst we were on our tour were the O\u2019Reilly ones and because I love them\nso much. I\u2019ll leave you with a link to their menagerie\u2026 https:\/\/www.oreilly.com\/animals.csp<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Clare Playforth I\u2019ve recently had an exciting visit to the Wiley European Distribution Centre with the Society of Indexers and because I am kind and you are lucky I\u2019m going to share the experience here. The Wiley warehouse is spread over a couple of units on an industrial estate in Bognor Regis and after … Continue reading The Wiley warehouse<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":231,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[150885],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9fi5f-bp","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/libstaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/libstaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/libstaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/libstaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/231"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/libstaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=707"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/libstaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":708,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/libstaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707\/revisions\/708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/libstaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/libstaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/libstaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}