This article is based on a brief presentation delivered at the fall 2003 meeting of Ohio GODORT at Wright State University in Dayton. The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County (PLCH), thanks to the initiative of its Public Documents and Patents Department (PDs), decided in 2002 to become a passport acceptance facility. Highlighted here are our experiences and success with the service, but of more relevance to you is deciding whether your library might want to offer the service itself.

PLCH unveiled its passport service in January 2003, and by the end of October had processed 644 applications. Each new application handled by an acceptance agent demands, by law, a $30 agent fee separate from the standard $55 ($40 if applicant under sixteen) passport application fee sent to the Department of State (DOS). Thus, the library earned $19,320 in ten months.

While this revenue clearly is the incentive for taking on an additional task, more subtle but equally important are the related benefits. With evening and weekend hours, and perhaps a more accommodating staff (many patrons noted how happy they were to bypass the post office!), PLCH better serves the public and business community. In turn, the service has lured non- or untraditional users to the library and into a Federal depository to boot-every application becomes an opportunity to expose the patron to our services and the world of government information.

Ask yourself and your institution these questions before you commit. "How do you do it?" will be outlined further below in case you're still curious.

Only permanent full-time staff directly employed by the institution may serve as acceptance agents. In PDs, which fully handles the service, we currently have 7 acceptance agents, and that makes a difference. If we average 20 minutes of one-on-one service time per application, our workload might look like this:

• April (peak): 94 applications processed = 30 hours staff time
• July (valley): 32 applications processed = 10 hours staff time

You one-person depositories will be laughing at this point, but consider the following. You can offer the service on an appointment-only basis (as we do on nights and weekends), and could centralize the service in your circulation or reference department so that full-time staff from throughout the system could participate. Or think of it this way: you'd be making $90 an hour.

If you're no more convenient (nor pleasant!) in terms of location, hours, staffing, and speed of service than your local post office, then this might not be a service worth providing. But as one college librarian noted, you may have untapped customers right under your nose, e.g., students studying abroad, the children of local immigrants, or traveling businesspeople whose offices are only footsteps away.

1) Daily mailings? You should mail applications to the passport agency within a day of receiving them from the patrons, and ideally not by means of any convoluted institutional procedure.

2) Securing of materials? As you would be taking the official citizenship evidence from the patrons, you will need to be sure of the documents' protection, especially if you hold them overnight before mailing.

3) I.D. judgment and application inspection? Your key function as an agent is deciding that the person before you is the person pictured on the official identification presented, so this sort of assessment is something that you must be comfortable with. Your other primary tasks are to review the application in front of the patron, making sure that it has been adequately completed; cross-checking that information with the ID and citizenship evidence supplied; and verifying that the evidence is, at least, not a photocopy (the DOS will analyze it after that).

4) Accepting payment? Some public institutions may feel awkward about the "profit-making" aspect of the passport service. But don't forget that the $30 is legally mandated to be paid to any and all acceptance facilities, including the post office. And to be sure, many patrons would rather that your library got the dough.

5) Basic record-keeping? (Please-we're librarians.)

1) After meeting with colleagues and administrators at your library to see if applying for acceptance facility status is a viable possibility, have your director fax a letter expressing your interest to:

Chrystal Watkins
Passport Services
CA/PPT/FO/CS
2100 Pennsylvania Avenue NW 3^rd Floor
Washington, DC 20037
(202) 663-3977

Upon approval, you will be assigned a regional customer service manager-your direct contact for all the questions you'll have as you launch the service. All designated staff will sign papers attesting to their qualifications, and the DOS must in future be made aware of any changes in staff status or involvement.

2) You will be notified of one-day training seminars scheduled regularly in your region. Not all of our staff could attend due to timing and distance and, though useful, the seminar I attended was less of an orientation than a Q&A for seasoned agents. So we relied on our own in-house training, based entirely on the Passport Agent's Reference Guide (PARG) now issued on CD-ROM to every facility. The PARG is an exhaustive step-by-step explanation of how to review an application (not to mention the patron), with every what-if scenario accounted for in detail. We required all of our agents to read the PARG, answer quizzes we devised, and role-play in numerous situations. While the majority of our patrons supply the standard, simple documentation, we still consult the PARG when we're pitched a curve ball.

3) You should consider establishing a space, however small, for accepting applications; we have an extra office desk in our department where we can sit with the patrons and store materials. If you can only serve an applicant over a public desk, you should still make room for the following:

• DOS forms (various and supplied in bulk by the Passport Office)
• the PARG
• your library seal and date stamp
• mailers
• black pens (for you) and crayons (for the kids!)

Somewhere you will also have to store a year's worth (approx. one large binder) of copies of the daily transmittal lists you submit with each mailing-your records of whom you served and when. Our library took the extra precaution of creating a checklist we fill out for every patron, documenting the interaction, what ID we reviewed, and what citizenship evidence we submitted to the DOS, in the rare event that a problem arises later.

4) You should determine how you'll process the $30 payments from the patrons; we have our patrons submit cash or check to our circulation desk before signing the application. In addition, you should streamline as much as possible your institution's mailing procedures-you really can't have the "expedite" (rush) applications snoozing in the mail room.

5) And finally-tell it to the world! To aid public awareness, PLCH had the means to create:

• a web page added to our library site (http://passports.cincinnatilibrary.org/)
• a brochure and in-house signage
• a separate phone number (513-369-6976) with informative message options
• an email address (passports@cincinnatilibrary.org) for questions and appointments

In publicizing our new service, we not only used our standard press outlets, but contacted sources of likely customers (passport photographers, study-abroad offices, large international businesses) and even our "competitors," who have been glad to tell patrons that they have another option.

In conclusion, I am happy to report that the service has been running very smoothly. While training ourselves and publicizing the service initially took some time, the acceptance of applications has become an almost invisible part of PDs' routine. We've had an extremely low problem rate, with fewer than 10 follow-ups out of 644 applications. The support we receive from our customer service manager is always courteous and reliable. Our administration is happy about the revenue and, even better, our patrons tell us that they're happy too.

Please feel free to contact the author's agency if you have any questions or comments.