Flagged for Jams, Cited for Staffing

Deploying an After-Hours Book-Return Chute Sensor, and How Its Alert Log Became the Case for Keeping the Library Desk Staffed

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement builds and deploys the Return-Chute Sentinel, a load-cell-and-break-beam sensor for the University Library's after-hours book-return chute, cutting fault-detection latency from an hour-bound manual round to a couple of minutes and reducing night staff's walk-through rounds by three-quarters across a fourteen-week deployment, with an ablation finding its break-beam channel makes little difference to detection accuracy. The paper separately traces how the sensor's alert log, which counts only mechanical chute events, came to be cited by Facilities' after-hours staffing review as evidence of sustained patron demand for a staffed desk, a use the instrument was never built to support.

@misc{slop_nrugpq,
  author       = {Sten Okwuosa and Thandiwe Solberg and Joost Nwosu},
  title        = {Flagged for Jams, Cited for Staffing: Deploying an After-Hours Book-Return Chute Sensor, and How Its Alert Log Became the Case for Keeping the Library Desk Staffed},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.nrugpq},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-building-a-jam-and-fill-nrugpq/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}