ACQNET v1n095 (August 3, 1991) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/serials/stacks/acqnet/acq-v1n095 ACQNET, Vol. 1, No. 95, August 3, 1991 ====================================== ISSN: 1057-5308 (1) FROM: Christian SUBJECT: Who's new on ACQNET today (23 lines) (2) FROM: Christian SUBJECT: ACQNET in July (29 lines) (3) FROM: Christian SUBJECT: Administratrivia (34 lines) (4) FROM: Peter Stevens SUBJECT: Vendor selection guidelines, discounts (23 lines) (5) FROM: Joe Barker SUBJECT: Vendor selection guidelines (34 lines) (6) FROM: Linda Connors SUBJECT: Consulting for acquisitions (15 lines) (7) FROM: Peter Stevens SUBJECT: Price differentials for monographs, Ablex (16 lines) (1) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: August 3, 1991 From: Christian Subject: Who's new on ACQNET today Marty Kellogg Linda Connors Asst. Acq. Librarian (Serials) Head, Acq, & Coord., Coll. Development Univ. of Rhode Island Library Drew University Library E-mail: OJS101@URIACC.BITNET E-mail: LCONNORS@DREW.BITNET Ginny Lunt Helen B. Trucko Acquisitions Associate Asst. Head of Acquisitions Drew University Library Univ. of Illinois at Chicago Library E-mail: VLUNT@DREW.BITNET E-mail: U49724@UICVM.BITNET Ian Young Janice Flug Ref./Collection Devel. Librarian Head of Acquisitions Univ. College of Cape Breton American University in Washington E-mail: IYOUNG@CAD.UCCB.NS.CA E-mail: JFLUG@AUVM.BITNET Rosemarie Melchiorre Library Technician West Chester University RMELCHIO@WCU.BITNET (2) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: August 3, 1991 From: Christian Subject: ACQNET in July I want to thank Richard Jasper and Scott Wicks on behalf of all of us for keeping ACQNET going. Scott signed on 35 new members, bringing us to a total of 269. Among others, Richard kept the discussion on ordering from vendor slips and ethics going. It would have been a pity to interrupt it. For me this was an important milestone since this past month proved that ACQNET can go on perfectly well without me, and that's the way it should be. It should not be dependent on one person lest it becomes nothing more than a monument to that person. While you were happily networking I experienced some deep, Twaynian thoughts in Cairo, IL, at the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, visited with Karen Schmidt and her colleagues at the University of Illinois, saw lots of 4th-of-July fireworks from my 5th-floor hotel window in Skokie, IL, re-visited the Badlands in South Dakota, rode a fairly ponderous horse named Winston in Wyoming, saw 6 bald eagles, moose, marmots, lots of spectacular flowers at 10,000 feet in the Big Horn mountains, picked up fossil sponges, pretended for hours that I was a whale in a big swimming pool, read, and fished a 19-inch brown trout in the Big Horn River in Montana. I didn't look at a computer terminal once. ALA felt different, and I believe ACQNET may have something to do with that. I know so many more of you now, and we have already shared so many experiences through this newsletter that meeting you in person has a very different quality. There is, at the start, a rapport that just wasn't there before. I would be interested in knowing if others feel something like this. (3) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: August 3, 1991 From: Christian Subject: Administratrivia How many of you noticed that we now have an ISSN? I am not exactly sure what it does for us, but I count serials librarians among my friends and they told me that it would be A GOOD THING to get one. I mean, I have read the list of advantages as explained by NSDP, but it all seems so ... print-oriented. Anyway, I did it. I will be sending updated directories after this issue. Please check the entry for your name. It should include your full name, position, work address, work telephone, FAX number, and e-mail address. If any item is missing or incor- rect, please send me the necessary information if you want your entry to be complete or corrected. For one of you (AMAGNELL@DREW) I don't even have your name, although I suspect it probably is Magnell. That's why you are not listed. For 5 of you (Flanagan, Graham, J. Johnson, Kornfeld, and Piper) I have your name, e-mail address, and nothing else. There is, of course, no requirement that anyone send anything, but this information helps me decipher headers and helps define the ACQNET community and tailor ACQNET to it. I will also send an updated index and list of back files, both current. In about a month I'll be asking you for feedback on these. Finally, there are 4 new back files available: SUBJECT FILE NAME Acquisitions/Collection development relationship ACQ_CD.POS Acquisitions profession ACQ_PROF.POS Ethics ETHICS.POS Tenets of acquisitions ACQTENET.POS To request these or any others, write to me at this e-mail address specifying the name of the files you want. (4) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Peter Stevens Subject: Vendor selection guidelines, discounts Date: Tue, 30 Jul 91 8:37:59 PDT While we do not yet have written vendor selection guidelines, we do maintain lists of foreign vendors, arranged by country, for staff who select vendors, as well as a long list of US and Canadian publishers--about 600--and the vendor who provides us with the best discount for each of these vendors. This latter list also note that discount so that I can compare the discount that we are now receiving with any offers that are made by competing vendors. Thanks to this list, we are able to acquire much of our US monographs at an average discount of about 17%. As more Acquisitions staff assume vendor selection responsibili- ties, I expect to be forced to document selection guidelines more explicitly. We also use our online vendor database on Geac to provide staff with informa- tion on vendor selection. (5) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 30 Jul 91 11:30:35 PDT From: Joe Barker Subject: Vendor selection guidelines I've talked to a number of libraries about guidelines for assigning vendors, and many of them consider it very high-level, professional work. At Berkeley we have assigned vendors with the basic philosophy that this is not difficult work. Serials are assigned according by a list by country, with standing orders always going to any approval plan dealer for that country which we have. When the approval plan vendor also will handle subscriptions, we will send the same vendor the latter also, unless there is an overriding concern (e.g., lousy performance in past with subscriptions, or vital automated services from another just-as-good vendor). Monographs are sent to the approval plan vendor if current publications, to the "best" vendor otherwise. When there is a tie, as with three U.S. vendors right now, we send equal quantities to each, randomly divided. In judging "best" vendor we look at special problems we can easily anticipate: out-of-print likely candidates get what we call "o.p. certification checking" and if we cannot find things in-print, the order goes to Photo/Search; "difficult" orders (we cannot find an address for the publisher and have never heard of this publisher before, or obscure or troublesome associations or agencies) we will send to the most tenacious vendor, who usually is the same vendor as the one with the biggest publisher-address database. This work is done by mid-level pre-order checking clerks, and counts for nothing special in the classification of their jobs. I establish the guide- lines and the vendors they can chose among in conjunction with ongoing vendor performance evaluation. I've rarely experienced any consequential departure by staff from the guidelines I give them. I'd be interested to hear on ACQNET how many others out there take this or an even simpler approach. (6) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1991 11:10 EDT From: "Connors, Linda" Subject: Consulting for acquisitions The library administration has decided that an outside consultant might be able to suggest some new acquisitions procedures (in lieu of additional staff or a different automated system--although this has not been explicitly stated, it is the director's assumption) to help us avoid backlogs and a sense of barely keeping our heads above water. Does anyone have any recommendations? Consul- tants they've used or know about. Should not be a known apologist or outspoken critic of the automated system we are currently using (DRA). Should be knowledgeable about automated systems and about monograph and non-periodical serial acquisitions in a medium-size selective university. Thanks for your help. (7) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Peter Stevens Subject: Differential pricing for monographs Date: Wed, 31 Jul 91 14:46:27 PDT Have you ordered a copy of the Ablex title NATIONAL RESEARCH AND EDUCATION NETWORK (NREN) by Charles R. McClure? The book was noted in the _Chronicle for Higher Education_ as costing $95 for libraries and $45 for individuals. I wrote Ablex asking about this differential pricing policy and received a reply from Walter J. Johnson, president (via USPS Express Mail, at a cost of $9.95), indicating that this was a courtesy to the author: to offer a lower price that applies mostly to college orders for course adoption, with most copies sold at the higher institutional rate. He noted that other publishers extended this "courtesy" as well and that this practice is little different from the institutional versus personal subscription rates charged for journals. At least the book comprises 675 pages! ***** END OF FILE ***** END OF FILE ***** END OF FILE ***** END OF FILE *****