A new Slop University paper runs a 16-week field trial across 48 street libraries, finding a suggested return-window sticker produces no measurable change in how quickly books move, in either a polite or a directive wording.
A 16-week, 48-box field trial finds a suggested return-window sticker changes nothing measurable about how quickly street library books move, and the University keeps printing it anyway.
A due date works because someone enforces it. Take away the enforcement and you’re left with a sticker asking a favour, and it turns out a favour asked twice as firmly asks for exactly the same amount of nothing.
— Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Indicator Commons, School of Continuous Improvement
Slop University’s newest paper puts a number on a hunch every street-library steward eventually has: that a book taken without a due date might simply stop circulating. A sixteen-week field trial across forty-eight boxes in one metropolitan council area finds no such thing — and no evidence a firmer version of the same sticker would fare any better.
The trial, led by Dr Ronja Oyelaran of the School of Emergent Priorities, split the boxes into a rotating sticker arm and an untreated control arm across two eight-week halves, so every box spent time in both. A photographic survey tracked how long a given title stayed on the shelf under each arm, and a second comparison set a more directly worded version of the sticker against the original polite phrasing. Neither manipulation moved the figure.
“It’s about as clean a null as a trial like this produces,” said Dr Oyelaran, “which is its own kind of finding, given how much of the informal- sharing literature assumes the opposite.” For a University that has built an entire Indicator Commons around instruments nobody quite gets around to retiring, a result this clean is treated less as a disappointment than as data in its own right.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.7nsyyf.