The Globe and Mail — February 2024
The Great Reshelving
words by josh o'kane
The librarians’ months-long crisis was one step closer to being solved when, one morning in late February, a tractor-trailer of cardboard boxes backed into the loading dock of a sorting plant in Scarborough, Ont.
Inside were some of the last books, DVDs and other items that had been warehoused since last October’s cyberattack on the Toronto Public Library. Normally, they’d be ferried around town in sturdy grey bins, but with more than a million items in storage, supplies ran out. Hence the cardboard solution.
Returned items piled up. And up and up and up. Storage room ran out in nooks and crannies in branches across town, and at the Scarborough hub, and then at 15 trailers in the west end.
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