Shelfmark library modernization proposal

The deal

A library technology company answering a county RFP to modernize fourteen branches.

What the buyer needed to see

Longer hours, self-service and maker spaces, branch by branch, at a cost the board can explain.

What we built

• Fourteen drawers, one per branch plan
• A catalog search that traces a hold’s route
• A day at Willet Road, today’s hours against the new ones
• An install calendar for branch managers

Who opens which drawer

A supervisor thinks about the county and a branch manager thinks about one building, and this concept lets each read that way. Every manager can pull their own drawer and skip the other thirteen. Then the four parties who sign each get a chapter built on the question they’d ask in the room.

• Ruth, the county librarian, asks what happens to her staff and ticks the tasks self-service takes off them to see the hours given back
• Branch managers ask when they shut and for how long, and the answer is two weekdays, once, shown day by day for any branch
• Dev at County IT opens each system to see how it connects, with patron data kept in county-owned storage
• The five county supervisors pick a district and see its branches, the hours added and the cost per resident per year

Paper every library user has held

The cover is Bayview’s own catalog card. The schedule is a date-due slip with three install waves stamped on it, and the last step is a card to sign. In between, four sentences quoted from the RFP set the order of everything that follows, each with its section number beside it.

Search the catalog, then run a Tuesday

Library panels, in our read, weight the patron experience heaviest, so the catalog is there to use. Search a title, pick a home branch, and the map traces how a hold reaches you today and once the hubs at Central and Eastbay sort overnight. Then scroll one Tuesday at Willet Road, where staffed hours stay put and Open Plus fills the dark ends of the day with card entry, cameras and a librarian on call. Across the ten branches that suit it, open hours go from 582 a week to 942.

Two bids the Board can defend

The panel shortlists first and the Board votes after, so the page carries two versions of the money. The full bid is $9,800,000 over five years. Branches first comes to $8,705,000, with two maker spaces where the full bid has four and a smaller ebook fund. If the Board cuts, each line names what goes with it. A matrix maps every RFP requirement to its answer, including the one met only in part, Open Plus at ten of fourteen branches.

The detail that does the work

The proposal arrives as Bayview’s own catalog card with Shelfmark’s name typed on it.