ACQNET v1n061 (April 13, 1991) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/serials/stacks/acqnet/acq-v1n061 ACQNET, Vol 1, No. 61, April 13, 1991 ===================================== (1) FROM: Christian SUBJECT: Who's new on ACQNET today (12 lines) (2) FROM: Christian SUBJECT: ACQNET: Addition to editorial policy (19 lines) (3) FROM: Christian SUBJECT: Updated ACQNET lists (11 lines) (4) FROM: Michael Gorman SUBJECT: Combined monograph/serial acquisitions departments, accounting, technical services organization (34 lines) (5) FROM: Carol Hawks SUBJECT: Accounts reconciliation, auditing, technical services organiza- tion (19 lines) (6) FROM: Gordon Anderson SUBJECT: Czech exchanges, Polish exchanges (30 lines) (7) FROM: Christian SUBJECT: ACQNET off for one week (9 lines) (1) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: April 13, 1991 From: Christian Subject: Who's new on ACQNET today Mary E. Clack Stuart Milligan Harvard College Library SUNY College - Brockport E-mail: MCLACK@HARVARDA.BITNET E-mail: MILLIGAN@BROCK1P.BITNET Ilene Rockman Lynne Altstatt Interim Assoc. Dean of Libr. Svce Head of Acquisitions Cal Poly University of Pennsylvania E-mail: IROCKMA@ATL.CALSTATE.EDU E-mail: ALTSTATT@A1.RELAY.UPENN.EDU (2 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 10 Apr 91 22:21:40 EDT From: Christian Subject: Addition to editorial policy The ACQNET Editorial Board has approved the following statement for inclusion in the ACQNET Editorial Policy: ACQNET provides its members with the means to communicate electronically on matters of common interest. In order to facilitate this process, the editor accepts items for postings only when they are received electronically or as ASCII files on floppy disks. The reason for this is that I can't afford to take the time to key stuff, nor do I feel that I can ask my staff to do it. In recent days I have had two communications by mail. Their authors wanted to have them included in ACQNET. I said no, unless I received them electronically. One of the people got a tad testy. Rest easy, it was not an ACQNET member. It was a vendor whose stuff I would have rejected anyway. All it was was something to make himself look good. (3) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: April 13, 1991 From: Christian Subject: Updated ACQNET lists Barbara Winters who, you may recall, likes to work on the graveyard shift, wrote to me at 3:27 a.m. recently to inquire, gently as she always does, if it might not be time for a new index. Since Barbara's requests are almost as important to me as the ones from the Barbara in my house, here they will be, in separate files, following this number. They are up-to-date as of this issue. (4) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Michael Gorman Subject: acquisitions organization &c Date: Thu, 11 Apr 91 9:42:19 PDT I have been in favour of integrated acquisitions departments for many years. A long time ago, my then colleague, Bill Potter, wrote an article describing our experience with such integration at the University of Illinois in Urbana. It was greeted by wrothful and border-line demented denunciation from "serial- ists," one of whom compared us to Stalin in his treatment of the kulaks and said that "serialists' would simply go underground and wage guerrilla warfare against their oppressors. [This one the second Gorman Award for Overblown Historical Comparisons in Librarianship - the first having gone to Malcolm Shifrin for his comparison of Peter Lewis returning to Britain from America with an agreement on General Material Designations to Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich.] I have also long thought that, given an effective automation program, all of technical processing should be seen as a seamless process beginning with ordering and ending with marked materials being circu- lated. I can see no reason why that integrated range of activities should not reside within a single, integrated administrative structure. One correspondent mentioned that, in some state-supported institutions, ordering and receipt cannot be done by the same person. I suspect this may be one of the myths of acquisitions, similar to the reason often advanced for separate receipt and accounting units. Even if these restrictions are actual rather than imagined, is there any reason why different people in the same administrative structure should not order, receive, and pay for materials? One of the few things that I disagreed with the late Hugh Atkinson about was the separation of acquisitions and acquisitions accounting. I think in this instance I was right, for the separation at UIUC proved to be a disaster, spawning baroque bureaucratic rules and behaviour, antagonism, hostility, and mutual misunderstanding, and an extremely wasteful duplication of effort. I think it imperative that the administrator in charge of acquisi- tions be also responsible for acquisitions accounting. (5) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 11 Apr 91 22:25 EDT From: "Carol P. Hawks" Subject: Accounts reconciliation, auditing, technical service organization In response to Marsha Clark's concern about auditing and the combination of cataloging and acquisitions, my recent research reveals that there are three functions that must be separated to ensure audit integrity. Order, receipt, and invoicing. In even the smallest libraries, it should take 3 employees to perform these activities. The reason behind this is that with the functions segregated it requires at least two people to "collude" to defraud the organization. It is not a problem to combine departments such as order and receipt as long as the individuals' jobs are kept separate. Cross-training is what opens the can of worms and leads to an audit problem. Combining receipt and cataloging operations or activities does not pose a problem. (6) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 12 Apr 91 15:10:44 CST From: Gordon Anderson Subject: Letter from Czsl. Acad. of Sci. Today I received a letter from the Basic Library (Zakladni knihovna - Ustredi- vedeckych informaci) of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Prague. Jiri Zahradil, the director, informs that "owing to a great rise in prices of publications and multiple rise of postage", they are canceling ten of the 14 science and Slavic-studies journals they send us on exchange, beginning with the 1991 subscription year. So far, this only applies to those journals we get from the central library. I have not heard anything - yet - from those institutes whose journals we receive through direct exchange with their libraries. Over a year ago, the main distribution office of the Polish Academy of Sciences (ORPAN) for the same reasons reduced the scope of their exchange with us. It is a pity to lose such reliable sources of many important East Central European journals. But this is probably inevitable as these countries move to a real- money economy. Possible other means of acquiring Czech, Polish, etc. academy of science publications: 1. Acquire them directly from the institutes that publish them, either on exchange or for hard currency; 2. Acquire them through the (formerly) state-run distribution agencies, or from emerging new vendors in these countries; 3. Acquire them through our vendors in Western Europe or North America. Gordon Anderson Director, Library Slavic Department University of Kansas Library (7) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: April 13, 1991 From: Christian Subject: ACQNET off for one week And now, folks, I'm outta here, out of what Karen Muller calls my funny little village, to see my parents and Katina in Charleston. My parents are 83 and 82, do not believe in computers, with or without half eaten fruit in rainbow colors, so you can't reach me. Back next Sunday. You have a whole week to stuff my mailbox. ***** END OF FILE ***** END OF FILE ***** END OF FILE ***** END OF FILE *****