BTD II - Project details (Büchertransportdienst Deutschland)

German Book Delivery Service: Book Delivery systems II (Büchertransportdienst Deutschland (BTD): Büchertransportsysteme II)

buechertransportdienst.sub.uni-goettingen.de

German reunification led to an extensive change in travel and traffic patterns - including those of library book delivery for inter-library loan, delivering more than 3.4 million items annually. To come to terms with the changed situation, two projects, 1993-95 and 1997-98, were undertaken to come up with a solution based on an analysis of the then-current condition and suggestions for optimization. The first project, "Buechertransportsysteme I," determined that a combination of regional state book delivery services with a national container-shipment service run by private transport services leads to an optimization of the cost-performance ratio.

In BTD II, already-existing resources are used to try to implement what had been learned in the first project.

The specific goals were:

  1. reduction of the service time by optimization of the truck book delivery service or the introduction of key concepts,
  2. improvement of service time for national deliveries, and
  3. reduction of freight delivery costs in libraries served by the truck book delivery service.

In the course of the project, significant successes in rationalization and savings were realized. In BTD II, the effective use of current resources resulted in a saving of some 1.86 million euros, realizing half of the rationalization potential. Still, this is only a partial success, consisting as it was of test runs, the permanence of the success of which has yet to be reached. Before the conclusion of the project in 1998, the Ministry of Culture conference "AG Bibliotheken" had already advocated the continuance of the application phase. Since the first day of 1999 the coordination of the various logistics concepts for the German states is, as before, being carried out at the Goettingen State and University Library.

Affiliates

SUB Göttingen departments / units involved in the project

Former project staff of the SUB Göttingen

Prof. Dr. Norbert Lossau, Fred-Dierk Triebel