Disaster Recovery at Rio Hondo Community College

It was less than a week when the new semester would be starting at Rio Hondo Community College in Whittier, California. Jan Coe, Library Coordinator, was staring at 12,000 books lying in a big heap on the floor in the middle of the library.

A Mountain of books
An outside construction company had just completed their work in the library when something went wrong. Bookshelves came tumbling down creating a mountain of books on the floor. Trying to help, the construction crew stacked the entire 12,000 books into one enormous pile in the middle of the floor.

Moving the mountain
Eyeing the 12,000 books on the floor, Jan said, "I was stunned! Not just by the size and state of the pile, but at the number of man-hours it would take our staff to re-shelve and shelf-read each book! One of our librarians thought of contacting Advanced Information Management (AIM). It took awhile to convince the library administration of the need to bring in qualified library workers to ‘move the mountain.’ It ended up being the perfect solution. We were extremely pleased with AIM’s services."

AIM to the rescue
Jan called Belinda Beardt, Regional Manager of AIM’s Southern California office. With six years of experience at AIM, Belinda knew just what to do. She rounded up a team of pages and paraprofessionals willing to work extended hours to meet the challenge. With only four days until the semester started, there was little time to spare.

Equipped with only a shelf list, book carts and a radio, the team assembled early Friday morning and formulated its attack plan. Hours into the project, it became evident that the team was too small to meet the deadline. Working late into the night and over the weekend, Belinda located additional workers to augment the team.

"There’s never a dull moment in the staffing business!" notes Belinda. "Every day brings new challenges from our clients and our job is to meet and exceed their expectations. Our clients have demanding jobs as it is and there are many occasions where help is needed for extraordinary situations."

Business as usual

When the students entered the library on the first day of the semester, the books were on the shelves and the library was in full operation. Jan and the library staff focused all their attention to the students.

In a note of appreciation, Jan said, "I want to thank you for the great service AIM provided us. The people you sent over were helpful and professional. It made the huge job disappear like melting chocolate! Everyone in the library was impressed with the skills of the people who worked on the project and the interest they showed in getting everything right."