ACQNET v5n010 (March 22, 1995) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/serials/stacks/acqnet/acqnet-v5n010 ISSN: 1057-5308 *************** ACQNET, Vol. 5, No. 10, March 22, 1995 ======================================== (1) FROM: Paul Sonberg SUBJECT: Ordering _Birds of North America_ (60 lines) (2) FROM: Brian McLaughlin SUBJECT: Performance Rights When Ordering Videos (17 lines) (3) FROM: Dave Fisher SUBJECT: Technical Pages (Boulder, Colo.) (12 lines) (4) FROM: Ron Ray SUBJECT: Internet & Other Technology in Acquisitions (83 lines) (5) FROM: Nancy Slight-Gibney SUBJECT: ALA Midwinter Report (89 lines) (6) FROM: Jackie Youngblood SUBJECT: Italian Book on Roberto Baggio (13 lines) (1)---------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 08 Mar 1995 14:23:30 -0500 From: Paul Sonberg (Academy of Natural Sciences) Subject: Libraries Purchasing _Birds of North America_ This notice has been cross-posted to a few lists and may result in tiresome reiteration for inveterate listniks. Sorry. Please reply to sender rather than to the list. A large monographic reference set, published in parts over a decade, can present technical challenges to libraries. _THE BIRDS OF NORTH AMERICA_, ed. by Alan F. Poole and Frank B. Gill (Philadelphia: Academy of Natural Sciences; Washington, DC: American Ornithologists' Union, 1992-- , ISSN 1061-5466) is just such an animal. This publication, when finished in 2001, will consist of 720 numbered fascicles. Each fascicle is a species account (or "life history") covering a particular bird. They are grouped into 18 slipcase volumes of 40 fascicles each. There are now three fully published volumes in print with the fourth nearing completion. For current volumes-in-progress, subscribers receive eight species accounts at a time so that five such shipments complete a full volume. As you can see, the method of distribution resembles that of a journal more than anything else. This format works well for the many private subscribers who use the slipcase boxes and keep the material unbound at home or at the office. But since this is a landmark, peer-reviewed reference tool in the natural sciences and environmental studies, hundreds of new library subscribers have begun taking the series as well. Libraries frequently inquire about the best way to deal with the eccentricities of _THE BIRDS OF NORTH AMERICA_ format. They're looking for options and recommendations in the areas of acquisitions, cataloging, binding, and circulation. What is the best way to handle recurring elements of the publication such as the contents pages, cumulative indexes, and corrigenda sheets? We would like to begin sharing this sort of information in a more systematic way. As a service to recent library subscribers--and to others who may have postponed these decisions--the publisher has surveyed a number of libraries which have dealt thoughtfully with these handling issues. We thank those librarians for sharing their local solutions. Other libraries can now look to this information for guidance. A 4-page summary is available to anyone for the asking. Please call or leave a message asking for the "Advice to Libraries" piece and I'll send it out promptly. Sincerely, Paul A. Sonberg Sales Director THE BIRDS OF NORTH AMERICA Academy of Natural Sciences 1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway Philadelphia, PA 19103-1195 215-493-1607 (Tel.) 215-299-1182 (Fax) (2)---------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 08 Mar 1995 15:45:43 -0500 From: Brian McLaughlin (Syracuse Univ.) Subject: Performance Rights for Video Orders I would be interested in any insights or suggestions from libraries that have dealt with performance rights for video orders. Does anyone purchase videos for OTHER than "classroom use only." If you do, do you annotate your order records (for the public) in any way? Are there any vendors who have tried to address the performance rights issue? All comments and suggestions are welcome- I will summarize for the list if necessary... Thank you! Brian McLaughlin Bibliographic Services Syracuse University Library (3)---------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 09 Mar 1995 12:03:00 -0800 From: Dave Fisher (Scripps Institution of Oceanography) Subject: Technical Pages (Boulder, Colo.) Does anyone know what has happened to Technical Pages in Boulder, Colo.? Without any prior announcment they seem to have vanished. Mail is returned and their phone is no longer service. Dave Fisher Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library (3)---------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 13 Mar 1995 12:01:02 -0800 (PST) From: Ron Ray (Univ. of the Pacific) Subject: Internet & and Other Technology in Acquisitions Whoa! I certainly confess to making my share of ignorant, uninformed statements, so there's no good reason anyone should doubt that I made the one Pam Rebarcak attributes to me in her report of last year's ALCTS Preconference, "Closing the Loop: Reconceptualizing Acquisitions in the Electronic Age." (_Library Acquisitions: Practice and Theory_ Vol. 19, no. 1 [1995] pp. 111-113): "[Ray] said that he sees very little evidence that the new technological developments and Internet applications are being used by acquisitions librarians." It's true that I was speaking from penciled notes, not from a manuscript, and thus retain no documentation how I may have actually phrased that idea. But I do know, and knew then, that acquisitions librarians (and materials vendors) have been quite active experimenting with the Internet in their work. What I recall thinking, and intended to express, was that acquisitions librarians apparently have not been *integrating* or *adopting* the Internet and other technological developments into their regular procedures, since we've seen very little in the way of reports to that effect. If there are numbers of us trying out the Internet for acquisitions, it's surprising that we don't regularly see reports of that experimentation on ACQNET or elsewhere. I'd be more reassured if I saw accounts of "what we've done well in acquisitions using the Internet", or equally important, reports of "what we've tried and haven't gotten to work so well over the Internet," maybe sparing the rest of us from heading down the same blind alleys. If the Internet and other developments do promise anything for acquisitions then this should be an active time of experimentation and testing of new models that integrate these tools. My objection to the image of "Closing the Loop" was that it suggested we were somewhere near closure on new concepts that could be widely adopted. It seems to me rather that at this time there should be a proliferation of new models, or at least a proliferation of reports on testing new tools (much as we're seeing in regard to electronic journals and scholarly communication) along with an extended period of trial and revamping those of models, before we'd be anywhere near adopting or integrating widely new electronic tools. My purpose here is in no sense to correct Pam's report of the preconference, which I think is a good report, but to try to state a little better what I must have botched then: that there doesn't appear to be much sharing of information among acquisitions librarians regarding their use of the Internet or other developing technologies within their depts.--and further, ACQNET is an ideal vehicle for sharing these types of reports. (Concomitant to that, I maintain that only the more significant reports should make it into our printed journal literature.) I am trying to practice what I preach--planning soon to post an analysis of one of our experiments here at UOP placing orders over the Internet. My preliminary glance at the data suggests that there wasn't any significant difference in fulfillment speed by ordering (domestic monographs) over the Internet from what we find in our traditional model of printing p.o.'s. and dropping them in the mail. I'd be interested in reports from other acquisitions depts.; does anyone have data indicating that transmitting orders or claims over the Internet is appreciably speeding up fulfillment rates? One last clarification: Pam correctly reports a couple other ideas I expressed, in particular, the constant change and transitions promised in "post-modern" acquisitions. But I want to be sure that Sharon Propas and Vicky Reich get due credit for setting my thinking along those lines at the Feather River Institute shortly before the preconference. (See their "Post-Modern Acquisitions" in the same issue of LAPT.) RON RAY (4)---------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 14 Mar 1995 08:38:14 -0800 (PST) From: Nancy Slight-Gibney (Univ. of Oregon) Subject: ALA Midwinter Discussion Group Summary This is a summary of the joint meeting of the Acquisitions Administrators Discussion Group and the Acquisitions Topics for Large Public Libraries Discussion Group, ALA Midwinter Conference, Philadelphia, Sunday February 5, 1995. The topic for discussion was DOING MORE WITH LESS OR DOING LESS WITH LESS? : THINKING INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE ACQUISITIONS BOX. The guest discussion leaders were: Miriam Palm, Principal Acquisitions Librarian, Serials and Acquisitions Department, Stanford University Libraries and Jenny Lorentowicz, Director, Technical Services, Mississauga Library System. Miriam Palm presented a progress report on the re-engineering activity in technical services at Stanford University. Re- engineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes. The impetus for this at Stanford was a mandate to cut $750,000 from technical services costs. A redesign team was formed and met with consultants. They gathered information from vendors and conducted a customer satisfaction survey of public services staff. The following principles were applied to Stanford's environment: minimize physical handoffs; eliminate duplicate and unnecessary steps; perform work where it makes the most sense; maintain/improve customer satisfaction; encourage risk-taking and innovation; and deliver quality products. Applying these principles the study team came up with the following eight recommendations: 1. Acquire shelf-ready materials from vendors; defer selector's item review for both approval materials and firm orders until the materials are ready to be shelved. 2. Exchange data electronically with these same vendors: submit orders directly to their on-line databases and receive electronic bibliographic, holdings, item (barcode) and invoice information for all items supplied. 3. Use automated batch search services to repeat bibliographic searches when fuller cataloging copy is needed. 4. Consolidate the processes of receiving and posting of payment for materials received and invoiced manually. 5. Use standards-based technology to support simultaneous pre -order searching of local database and bibliographic utilities; automate batch creation of order records in local file as a result. 6. Use technological enhancements to facilitate the activities of original cataloging and redesign original cataloging work flow to assign tasks across a broader range of staff. 7. Decentralize certain categories of catalog maintenance. 8. Check-in all serials on-line in service units. Focus groups have met to discuss the proposed changes and implementation teams will be formed. Jenny Lorentowicz spoke from the perspective of someone who has worked both in public and academic libraries. She is both amazed and appalled at the quick and dirty approach to technical services in public libraries and the rigidity in academic libraries. Some of the differences between the two types of libraries revolve around selection and collection development. There is a lot of duplication of effort in the selection process in public libraries. Some are moving to a more academic-like subject specialist approach to save time. The relationship between the library and vendors is also different. Public librarians like the subject-based lists of titles that vendors provide as almost a quasi approval plan. Vendors may find it easier to work with public libraries because of the multiple copy orders and the fact that public libraries are not as fussy about different editions of a work. She posed a series of questions that we should ask ourselves about our technical services processes: 1. How much time do we spend gathering statistics? How many times do we count the same thing? What do we do with the information? All libraries can look at this and probably save time here. 2. Do you really need to check in serials? Does it matter what your record says or does it only matter what is actually on the shelf? 3. Can you look at a local mass-market distributor to provide you with popular magazines? Would this be cheaper and quicker? 4. What little things are you doing that you can stop doing? Something that only takes a few minutes a day adds up over the course of a year. 5. What do bookstores do? Maybe we should look more carefully at profit-making organizations as models. One example is multiple titles per purchase order. This may be more efficient than single title orders. 6. How can we make the best use of EDI? 7. Is outsourcing an answer? A lively hour-long discussion followed concerning issues raised by both presenters. The discussion was moderated by Nancy Slight-Gibney, Chair of the Acquisitions Administrator's Discussion Group and assisted by Kay Granskog, Vice Chair/Chair Elect, and Joanne Adetayo, Chair of the Acquisition's Topics for Large Public Libraries Discussion Group. Topic ideas for the next meeting in Chicago in June were solicited. (5)---------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 14 Mar 1995 14:50:55 -0500 From: Jackie Youngblood (Ft. Vancouver Regional Library) Subject: Italian book on Roberto Baggio [Please reply to Jackie, not to ACQNET -- Ed.] Some time ago _Sports Illustrated_ had an article about Roberto Baggio that mentioned his autobiography _BAGGIO IL FENOMENO_. We have had requests for this title, but have been unable to verify a source. I assume it is in Italian and would appreciate any help identifying possible Italian language distributors. ****** END OF FILE ****** ACQNET, Vol. 5, No. 10 ****** END OF FILE ******