Absolutely fascinating to watch. There are currently 1.5 million items handled. All are stored in standard crates - it looks like about 20 items per crate, in a random fashion though grouped by size. Each crate has a bar code and each book slot within the create has a bar code. The bibsys LMS system was enhanced to deal with the processing. So requests are fed to the system which knows which crate the book is currently located and this information is transferred to the picker queue so the automatic retriver will pick out the right crate and load it on the conveyor belt. When it arrives in the document delivery room the screen flashes to the operator which folder the book is in and they pick it out. It is replaced with a returned book and the operator scans the book's bar code and places it in the empty slot and the crate returns to the automatic stack where it is placed back in a random position which is recorded by the system.
In this way 150 crates are handled per hour. The system is used for loans to other libraries and for the book digitisation program. Items other than books are also handled eg films, tapes etc
On the other hand their document delivery system is quite manual. They do deliveries once per day so multiple books for the one library are grouped together.
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