desperately seeking status: acquisitions librarians in academic libraries

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Library Acquisitions: Practice & Theory, Vol. 15, pp. 349-354, 1991 0364-6408/91 $3.00 + .rJo Printed in the USA. All rights reserved. Copyright 0 1991 Pergamon Press plc CHARLESTON CONFERENCE 1990 DESPERATELY SEEKING STATUS Acquisitions Librarians in Academic Libraries CHRISTIAN BOISSONNAS Acquisitions Librarian Cornell University Library Ithaca, NY 14853 I have a friend. His name is T.J. Booker, and he is acquisitions librarian at the George F. Angler Library of Fishkill State University, a large campus of the State University of New York located in Trout Creek. By all admissions, he is successful and well regarded by his em- ployer and vendors who deal with him. Until recently, collection development functions had been done on a part-time basis by librarians in public services and a couple of full-time area bibliographers. Then the newly hired Assistant Director for Collection Development, Michelangelo Kellerman, convinced his fel- low executives that the selectors should be involved in all aspects of the book procurement pro- cess. They should, for example, place their own orders, a change that was easily accomplished given the automated system already in use. He also said that having the selectors communi- cate with vendors instead of the acquisitions staff would improve both the quality of the com- munications as well as processing efficiency. So the Acquisitions and Serials departments were reorganized, and their receiving operations combined under Booker’s direction. My friend T.J. was not thrilled when he was named head of a combined serials/monographs receiving department. He felt that he had lost much of what made his job interesting and challenging: keeping up with the publishing industry, trying to figure out new and better ways to buy books, and negotiating with vendors. He felt diminished. He was also angry, because he knew that the new system would cause a significant increase in errors with wrong books or duplicates sent, that books would cost more because they were ordered from the wrong source, and that Fishkill, which had been considered by vendors as a good place to do busi- ness, would acquire the reputation of a library in which people did not know what they wanted. Variations of what I described have recently happened at several institutions. In some cases, selectors handle their own acquisitions, and in others, acquisitions librarians have either not been replaced or their duties have been changed. Such developments, I believe, are detrimen- tal to the institutions in which they are happening and they are detrimental to us, the acqui- sitions librarians. What I plan to do in the next fifteen or so minutes is briefly discuss why I think these things are happening, then explain why this concerns me, and finish by suggesting 349

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Page 1: Desperately seeking status: Acquisitions librarians in academic libraries

Library Acquisitions: Practice & Theory, Vol. 15, pp. 349-354, 1991 0364-6408/91 $3.00 + .rJo Printed in the USA. All rights reserved. Copyright 0 1991 Pergamon Press plc

CHARLESTON CONFERENCE 1990

DESPERATELY SEEKING STATUS

Acquisitions Librarians in Academic Libraries

CHRISTIAN BOISSONNAS

Acquisitions Librarian

Cornell University Library

Ithaca, NY 14853

I have a friend. His name is T.J. Booker, and he is acquisitions librarian at the George F. Angler Library of Fishkill State University, a large campus of the State University of New York located in Trout Creek. By all admissions, he is successful and well regarded by his em- ployer and vendors who deal with him.

Until recently, collection development functions had been done on a part-time basis by librarians in public services and a couple of full-time area bibliographers. Then the newly hired Assistant Director for Collection Development, Michelangelo Kellerman, convinced his fel- low executives that the selectors should be involved in all aspects of the book procurement pro- cess. They should, for example, place their own orders, a change that was easily accomplished given the automated system already in use. He also said that having the selectors communi- cate with vendors instead of the acquisitions staff would improve both the quality of the com- munications as well as processing efficiency. So the Acquisitions and Serials departments were reorganized, and their receiving operations combined under Booker’s direction.

My friend T.J. was not thrilled when he was named head of a combined serials/monographs receiving department. He felt that he had lost much of what made his job interesting and challenging: keeping up with the publishing industry, trying to figure out new and better ways to buy books, and negotiating with vendors. He felt diminished. He was also angry, because he knew that the new system would cause a significant increase in errors with wrong books or duplicates sent, that books would cost more because they were ordered from the wrong source, and that Fishkill, which had been considered by vendors as a good place to do busi- ness, would acquire the reputation of a library in which people did not know what they wanted.

Variations of what I described have recently happened at several institutions. In some cases, selectors handle their own acquisitions, and in others, acquisitions librarians have either not been replaced or their duties have been changed. Such developments, I believe, are detrimen- tal to the institutions in which they are happening and they are detrimental to us, the acqui- sitions librarians. What I plan to do in the next fifteen or so minutes is briefly discuss why I think these things are happening, then explain why this concerns me, and finish by suggesting

349

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what we must do to reverse this trend. One reason why the trend started is the increased com- petition for resources within libraries. A second is the impact of technology. Our invisibility, I believe, is the third.

A drying well, relentless price increases, an expanding publishing universe, new needs such as conservation, and expensive technologies-the combination is crushing us. Selectors are be- ing held increasingly accountable for book fund expenditures. It is only natural, then, that they would want more control over the acquisitions process, or better assurances that it works. An indifferent or inadequate performance from the acquisitions people may negate their best efforts at controlling expenditures or building the collection that the institution demands.

The second cause is technology and its impact on library organization. Computers are mak- ing some decentralization practical. For example, it is no longer necessary for vendors to ship a library’s periodicals to a central location so that they can get checked in on a central record, then sent to the branch library to which they belong. This is an instance in which not decen- tralizing may have an adverse impact because it slows the delivery of information to users who are waiting for it.

In another example, computerized central bibliographic and processing files available to all means that a selector can browse through records, see one for something that he feels the li- brary should have, and order it with just a few key strokes. Assume that procedures can be worked out so that the selector knows which vendor to place his order with and also that he avoids ordering a book that is not really needed. It is not clear to me that having the selec- tor order that book is not more efficient than preparing a request and sending it to the acqui- sitions department to be processed.

The third problem is our invisibility in our libraries and librarianship as a whole. I will not spend much time on this problem; it is not peculiar to us. It is inherent to the kind of orga- nization that we work for and is shared by all technical services personnel. In any case I am not sure that it has to be that way. I shall discuss this last point in greater detail further on.

What happened at Fishkill State and similar developments elsewhere are detrimental to li- braries. They make the purchasing of books more expensive and they contribute to the build- ing of uneven collections, hence they impair the libraries’ service mission. Let me deal with each of those points in succession. In a large library, centralized processing allows for staff- ing efficiencies that are not possible in decentralized settings. It makes the purchasing of books less expensive. For example, where there are data entry clerks recruited for their keying abil- ity, they can generate many more orders per unit of time than people in decentralized settings, each of whom has many duties. Centralized processing also makes it possible to buy products at cheaper prices because of discounts based on volume. One can get a better overall discount from a vendor who has only one large account with a library rather than several small ac- counts, each one being different in small but important details.

Some efficiencies cannot be quantified so easily. Consider, for example, the knowledge that a good acquisitions person must collect in order to be successful. This person must be an ex- pert on the publishing industry worldwide, an industry that is notoriously difficult to study and stay on top of because it is so varied and changes so fast. An acquisitions librarian must contend with new formats such as videotapes or various types of electronic publications and must sift out from the daily record of changes in the world what is pertinent to his library. He must understand accounting from two different perspectives, not an easy task given the fact that each university has its own system, which is often different from the accounting sys- tem by which the book budget is controlled. All of us here are familiar with what I have just described. We try to do all these things and chronically complain that there are not enough hours in a day to be able to do them all well.

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In a decentralized setting, such as one in which bibliographers do their own acquisitions, several people in different administrative units must perform some or all of these same duties, each rediscovering for himself what others have already found. Because they may not perform these tasks frequently enough, not all staff members will remember or understand equally all they have read and studied. Also, their particular strengths may not be those that best match the requirements of acquisitions work.

This leads me to my second point, that this kind of decentralized process in a large library augments the unevenness of its collection. The best collection in the world has weak areas. Selectors try hard to improve them with varying degrees of success, but they often already have more to do than they can handle. In reviewing the literature on the organization of collection development, I was surprised by the large number of tasks that selectors in various libraries, are called upon to perform. And that is before they take over from their acquisitions depart- ments the responsibility of running their own acquisitions, before they learn all this arcane stuff that they must know to do the job right.

Please understand that I am in no way implying that selectors are not capable of doing this work. They, or at least those that want to be, are as capable as we are. But I do see a very practical problem in selectors’ finding enough time to do this work well. Developing acqui- sitions skills is not something that happens overnight, or even in a few months. In a large library, this means first learning to manage, to supervise people, to satisfy the bureaucracy’s endless appetite for useless paper, none of which is intrinsic to acquisitions. It means learn- ing about a collection that is large and complex, about the people who manage it, and how the acquisitions component fits in with their work. Finally, as I have already said, it means learning all about publishing and bookselling. I have been doing this for 13 years and it is only in the past 4 or 5 years that I have really felt that I knew enough to perform adequately in my job. I have trained a number of librarians who were new to acquisitions, and I think that 3 years of full-time work is the absolute minimum needed to bring them to a point where they have seen and done enough to do more than survive.

So there is a very practical issue of time and not enough of it to do everything equally well. In addition, I think that managing is something that many selectors do not really want to do. They are more interested in research and scholarship than in management. Earlier this year, Margie Axtmann, one of my colleagues at Cornell, and I had been discussing the notion that the jobs of acquisitions and collection development required different skills. She wrote to me:

While it is true that the skills for both are not usually found in the same person, I think it is somewhat of an exaggeration to say that it is rare. I think it is more that it is hard to walk around with two dif- ferent mind sets. You’re always looking at the world from two very different perspectives, and it’s hard to be dedicated to both [l].

Axtmann is the Acquisitions Librarian of the Cornell Law Library. Until earlier this year, she also did collection development work for her library. She gave that up because she did not have enough time to do everything well.

So, typically in a large library, we have selectors who already have more to do than they can handle, only some of whom may want to do their own acquisitions. Assuming that the work load issue has been dealt with, only a few of them have managed to acquire enough ac- quisitions expertise to do the job as well as the acquisitions librarian who used to do it for them. The others still have to spend time learning, and that detracts from the time that they can devote to their collection development and management duties. The collection receives less attention than it normally would at a time when the problems facing it require more atten-

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tion and resources than are available. If you accept the premise that a library collection is the core of its being, its very r&on d’&e, then diluting the effort that is applied to its growth and maintenance is not desirable.

It is also not desirable for us, the acquisitions librarians. We, like all technical services staff, tend to be somewhat invisible compared with those who deal with the public. We do not need or want to become even less visible. And yet, we have found a niche in which we are happy or at least satisfied. We derive satisfaction from the knowledge that we have acquired, that we control our conditions as best we can and that, at least among our peers, we are viewed as successful, productive, and worthy contributors to our profession. Diluting the effort de- voted to a collection’s growth and maintenance is also not desirable because it reinforces the notion that acquisitions work is something to avoid, without future. You all know already how difficult it is to recruit new acquisitions librarians who have any kind of pertinent training. Imagine how much harder it will be if the few in library schools who are interested in pursu- ing a career in acquisitions perceive that it has no future.

I have tried to explain to you why the changes that happened at Fishkill are harmful for li- braries and acquisitions librarians. I would like to spend the rest of my time discussing what we must do to reverse the trend. We need to address three problems. Although I list them sep- arately, they are not isolated. I will be talking about them mostly simultaneously. One is a need to develop what Joe Hewitt in his famous article “On the Nature of Acquisitions” re- ferred to as “a strong library-oriented base of research” [2]. We also need to market ourselves better, increase our visibility to the people in our org~~tions who do not see us enough and to the library schools. And finally, we need to make sure that we are effective contributors to the solution of technical services and other library problems.

Let me first deal with Hewitt’s point. I bring it up only to reaffirm it and endorse it. If we want other people in our libraries to think of us as being their equals, then we need to take on the activities that will give legitimacy to our claim. Doing good research that is used to de- termine policies and directions is one of those activities. When you look at the library litera- ture, you do not see much from acquisitions librarians. And yet, we have a whole industry that begs to be analyzed and understood, the publishing industry. Since we need to understand it, there is no justification for the fact that we do not systematically analyze it.

Let me turn to the need to increase our visibility. In our libraries this means we have to con- vince our collection development colleagues that they need us, that they cannot be success- ful without us. We must convince them of what we can do that helps bring the books in, that they can’t do, or can’t do as effectively, such as negotiate better terms with vendors for all of them than they can negotiate individually, We must remind them and the executives above us to whom we are not as visible as we should be, that there is a good reason why we and not the university’s central purchasing department buy the books. If buying books were a simple matter we would not be needed. To successfully buy paper clips or furniture requires certain skills that many people possess. To buy books successfully requires skills that only librarians have. Saying this, however is not sufficient. We must demonstrate it again and again.

In addition to being fully involved in the business of collection development in our librar- ies, we must commit ourselves to being full participants in the business of technical services. Even if catalogers do not understand acquisitions, or need to, we share with them the essen- tial fact that we process the same book for a consumer, the user, who is the reason all of us are there in the first place. This means that we cannot look at our departmental boundaries as being the justification for procedures that start and end in one department. The process of getting a book through technical services cuts across these boundaries, now more than ever.

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We must be full participants in the processes of analysis and planning that will shape our libraries. How many of you have seen the article in the July/August issue of American Librar- ies that deals with new organizational patterns for libraries? [3]. The authors present an or- ganization in which the Acquisitions Division includes buying, borrowing, and leasing. Why not? It makes perfect sense to me to concentrate together all procurement activities. So, why was not this first proposed by an acquisitions librarian?

We must make our leaders want to come to us for input, because we are known to provide input of high quality. Remember, we are the experts on the publishing industry. We also know much that is pertinent to the solution of problems outside our departments, such as collec- tion growth rates, space planning, and fiscal planning. If we do not know, we should, because we handle the raw data before anybody else. I am talking about invoice lines, numbers of new books, how big they are, where they come from, how much money we spent for them, and countless other variables. It is within our power to make them tell stories or answer questions before they are asked. I can hear many of you say: “How can I do this? I don’t know enough about how to manipulate data, and, in any case, I don’t have time. I already have too much to do.”

My friends, you are librarians. This means that, by definition, you are professional peo- ple. A professional defines his job, he does not just perform it because someone tells him what to do. A professional takes the initiative to get the training and the expertise he needs to ac- complish what he set out to do. This means he does not wait until someone magically appears to tell him how to factor something like currency fluctuations into his daily life. He goes out and studies it or gets somebody to come and teach him.

This is where the library schools come in. Here we need to do two things: the first is to de- mand that the graduates be adequately trained to do the job we expect them to do; the sec- ond is to communicate to future librarians that a career choice in acquisitions is an attractive choice. It is a formidable challenge. I do not know if anything like it has ever been done be- fore. It requires us to become involved with the schools again, which is something that few, if any, of us do after we leave school and enter the profession. It requires us to become in- volved with the accreditation process, to spread the notion that a curriculum that does not have an acquisitions component is not acceptable. The time to do this is now. The Subcom- mittee on Standards Revision of the ALA Committee on Accreditation is in the middle of a three-year process to revise the 1972 Standards for Accreditation. Are we involved in this? If not, we should be. It requires us to have answers to the question: How can acquisitions work be taught? In summary, it requires us to come out of our comfortable little cocoons and make things happen.

I see some evidence to suggest that we have started doing that. The rejuvenation of the ALCTS RS Acquisitions Committee and the birth of several new acquisitions-related discus- sion groups at ALA is one sign that we are emerging. This conference is another. Look how it has changed, look how many of you were not here 3 years ago. And this is only one of three acquisitions conferences that were held this year. Here, if I might add quickly, we may be cre- ating a problem for ourselves. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Here is an- other sign; we have started talking about education. Donna Cohen has told us about that. If there is any hope on that front it is because people like her are carrying the torch. Well, noth- ing says that she has to do it alone. In fact, she cannot succeed without us.

At a meeting during ALA Midwinter last January, Barbara Winters said: “Acquisitions is a subprofession that is emerging.” This is true, but it is not emerging uniformly across a broad front. We are becoming more visible professionally, but not where it really counts right now,

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and that is within our own institutions, at least in large research libraries. In places like Fishkill State, people like T. J. Booker are languishing, because much of what made their jobs mean- ingful and satisfying has been taken away from them. I have tried to show you that it is within our power to do something about it. So let us do it and prove Barbara Winters right.

REFERENCES

1. Axtmann, Margaret Maes. Personal communication, June 11, 1990. 2. Hewitt, Joe A. “On the Nature of Acquisitions,” Library Resources and Technical Services 33 (1989), 110. 3. Hoadley, Irene B. and John Corbin. “Up the Beanstalk: An Evolutionary Organizational Structure for Librar-

ies.” American Libraries 21 (PM), 676-678.