BEHIND-THE-SCENES NYC LIBRARY OPERATIONS

At a warehouse tucked away in an industrial corner of Queens, books of all shapes, sizes and colors fly across a series of conveyor belts, tumbling into shipping containers destined for 150 library branches across New York City.

It's a symphony of bar codes and Dewey decimals, taking place under the watchful eye of an unlikely conductor: Salvatore Magaddino, 65, a onetime Police Department captain and now the maestro of the logistics department of this unique production, known as BookOps.

BookOps is a collaboration between the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library systems, an operation that sorts and sends books from branch to branch. The process includes organizing and cataloging the systems' books so that when a customer requests a book that isn't on the shelves at their location, Mr. Magaddino's team can have it there, usually by the next day.

Mr. Magaddino began his library career in 2006 and took over the logistics not long after, when the system was "in total disarray," he said. The sorting operations were housed at an old annex in Times Square with a crumbling loading dock, where about 20,000 books sat in a daily backlog. The library had to keep buying new books because the originals could not be found.

He helped find a new location in an abandoned warehouse in Long Island City, Queens, that had ample parking for the 10 trucks that ferry books around the city. It would become the headquarters of updated systems, complete with upgraded sorting machines.

In 2013, after the financial crisis of 2008 threatened some of those modernization plans, the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library decided to combine their logistics systems, with Mr. Magaddino helping to oversee the transition. According to the Urban Libraries Council, BookOps is designed to save the two library systems over $3 million each year.

BookOps now services four boroughs and is probably the largest such operation in the world, Mr. Magaddino said. Tens of thousands of books are sorted each day.

To read the complete article, see:
Waiting for a Library Book? This Man Makes Sure You Get It. (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/nyregion/nypl-queens-bookops-salvatore-magaddino.html)

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