ACQNET v1n009 (January 6, 1991) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/serials/stacks/acqnet/acq-v1n009 ACQNET, Vol 1, No. 9, January 6, 1991 ===================================== (1) FROM: Kay Granskog SUBJECT: BookQuest (18 lines) (2) FROM: Janet L. Flowers SUBJECT: Approval plan for American Belles Lettres (10 lines) (3) FROM: Kay Granskog SUBJECT: Acquisitions journals (26 lines) (4) FROM: Karen Muller SUBJECT: Acquisitions journals (28 lines) (5) FROM: Editor SUBJECT: E-mail address for Carol Hawks ( lines) (1) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Friday, 4 January 1991 10:21am ET From: "Kay.Granskog" <20676KAG@MSU> Subject: Reply to Meta Nissley/Book Quest Michigan State University has used BookQuest about 9 months on a Zenith with a hard drive and a Hayes modem. Collection Development actually uses it so I asked what they thought. Keying our manual Want File into the BookQuest program was most time consuming. Once the file was in place, the rest was declared simple. The Library Assistant who handles this checks her BookQuest mail every few days and sends out new listings weekly or as needed. We have had some sucess in location op items this way. (My searcher tells me the number is about 20 so far). As far as service goes, many of the participating vendors are antiquarian vendors we already use. Service is as good as the vendor with which we are dealing! (2) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 04 Jan 91 19:26 EST From: "Janet L Flowers" Subject: Approval plan for American Belles Lettres Here's a question for the group. Does anyone have a successful approval plan or blanket order for American belles lettres? If so, I would like to know more about it, especially who your vendor is. If not, how do other libraries go about identifying the belles lettres they need for their collectionns? Thanks. (3) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Friday, 4 January 1991 10:33am ET From: "Kay.Granskog" <20676KAG@MSU> Subject: Acquisitions Journals For the record, I was on vaction for a good portion of the time between Dec. 20 and the present. I do not intend to be silent. I do not know if there are too many acquisitions journals or not. One has to weigh all the factors. We just heard some convincing presentations at the Charleston Conference (and at ALA previously) that Acquisitions is not taught in library schools. It seems that if we want to be taken seriously in the scholarly community we have to behave as the scholarly community behaves. This means having our own journals with less than exciting articles and research. (Yes, I am implying that to imitate other disciplines we will have some articles that are boring, etc. Acquisitions does not have a corner on poor research or any of the rest). It is possible that Acquisitions Librarians decided to worry about our academic standing at an inopportune time--just as Librarians and hopefully the Universities are re-evaluating how we measure faculty worth. It makes me think of something my Russian History Professor said, "Russia has for centuries tried to keep up with the West by imitating the West. The West just does whatever it pleases." Agreed or not, his implication was that the West has set the pace. Perhaps Acquisitions Librarians are following the "Russia" model rather than the "West." (All this commentary from one who hasn't published). (4) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 4 January 1991 18:36:23 CST From: "Karen Muller/ALCTS 312-280-5031" Subject: Acquisitions journals Well, I just hit my 200 line limit halfway through your discussion of the quality of collection development/acquisitions library literature (the University of Illinois--Chicago bitnet system, which I am on, only enable 200 lines on the "peek" command; for the rest you have to be a real computer user). So, I'm making this comment based on what I did read. You ARE right, much of our literature IS poorly written, repetitious--and splintered in much the same way as the STM literature we rail about. So far, of course, our literature is relatively easy on institutional budgets (less so on personal budgets, though we CAN receive or subscribe to the two or three key items without undue financial stress) so we have not studied this as carefully. You may have gone one to say this, but what have our own urges for faculty status done to encourage the publication? More importantly, what can we do to curtail the proliferation, or make what does exist more meaningful professionally? In the course of a week I read or scan a wide variety of library literature (about 80 titles in all). Interestingly, the winners of the BNA award for the last two years were articles that jumped off the page when I first read them--or at least I stopped the scanning process long enough to *read* them. This suggests that we do know excellence when we find it; how can we be sure of finding it more often? P.S. Where I've been since December 20 is right here, but I can tell you who has been on vacation! (And it has not been the squirrels at my bird feeder.) (5) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DATE: January 6, 1991 FROM: Editor SUBJECT: E-mail address for Carol Hawks Does anyone have Carol Hawks's e-mail address, if she has one? She may not know about ACQNET yet and I would like to let her know about it. Thank you.