UPDATE:
We received a message from the Mission Viejo Library on March 16, 2016, informing us that their book drop is still working wonderfully, and thanking our team for suggesting such a durable, quality solution:
“Dear Electro Kinetic Technologies (Ray),
Our book drop retrieval cart is still going strong at the Mission Viejo Library. Thanks for a great product. It’s been a couple of years now and we haven’t had any problems with battery life, powertrain, tires or anything.
It’s been a huge help for our staff when retrieving library materials from a bookdrop that is over 800ft from the front door.
Kathleen M. Kelton
Library Manager”
Each day employees at the Mission Viejo Library in California make about seven trips to their parking lot book drops, as those fill up quickly during the day. For years they pushed and pulled large amounts of books and materials back to the library on manual carts. Each round trip measures 1,000 feet. Add the weight of the materials and that’s a lot of work, in fact, it limited some of the library employees, who had difficulty pushing the existing carts.
“It is not an easy task for anyone,” says Library Circulation Manager Kathleen Kelton. “In order to accommodate our employees, we needed to make some changes to our existing push/pull manual cart.”
The library found funding for the changes, they just needed someone who could handle the project. That’s when the group found Electro Kinetic Technologies and had their existing book cart retrofitted with ergonomic enhancements, including an electric motor. The retrofit included mounting the existing cart to a power platform base, repainting the entire cart, and adding new side and top molding.
Why not just buy a new industrial cart that could handle heavy-duty loads? Kelton says that retrofitting the existing cart, rather than buying new, allowed them to keep the benefits of a traditional library cart. For example, the padded float tray inside helps protect library materials from damage and prevents unnecessary bending down to retrieve the returned library materials.
Due to the cart update, there are more library employees who are able to make multiple daily trips to the parking lot book drops, and the work of retrieving returned materials is safer and more efficient.
