If you’ve been lurking in the staircase between the second and third floors of Olin recently, you’ve probably spotted a sign informing you that the library will soon be switching to a new book delivery vendor. It looks something like this:

The sign, in all its glory.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?! Learn more after the jump. 

Odds are, you probably aren’t sure of how a change in our college’s book-delivery vendor of choice will directly affect your life (spoiler alert: it probably won’t). I wasn’t clear on that either, until I spoke with Humanities Librarian Nina Clements and Library Services Supervisor Jennifer Beck, who were nice enough to tell me something (okay, everything) about the ins and outs of the new system.

According to Clements, our previous vendor, OhioLINK–a consortium of nearly 100 Ohio college and university libraries that work together to provide information–recently terminated its contract with Kenyon.  OhioLINK is currently working with our new and improved provider, Priority Dispatch, to get Kenyon through the transitional period until Priority Dispatch officially takes over on its own on April 16, 2012.

The change was necessary in part because of OhioLINK’s frequent pattern of missing deliveries, explained Beck. “We got a discount on their services if they missed a certain percentage of deliveries, so at a certain point it became necessary for them to just end their contract with us,” he said. “We haven’t had nearly as many email complaints since the contract stopped.”

Hey, less e-complaining has to be a good thing, right?

Unlike OhioLINK, Priority Dispatch sorts deliveries through a barcode system, rather than having people manually check each package, which will hopefully increase efficiency.

Clements’ final word on the switch: “People don’t seem to be too aware that there is a transition going on, so hopefully that means it’s working. Generally, if people are very aware of the [library book vendor] system, that’s not a great thing.”