the great reshelving - 2024
shot for the globe and mail
words by josh o'kane
with video by melissa tait
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. The usual grey bins ran out by the time trailer No. 2 was full, so cardboard boxes had to do for Nos. 3 through 15.
On the day the trailer docked, the Scarborough hub was in high gear as staff sorted items and shipped boxes.
Days earlier, The Globe and Mail also visited the Cedarbrae branch as it received and reshelved books for patrons.
If anyone can handle hundreds of hours of tedious sorting, it is the staff of Canada’s largest public library system. People have taken on new jobs across the complex system to get the library’s holdings back to where they need to be: on shelves and in Torontonians’ hands.
