Library Acquisitions: Practice and Theory, Vol. 7, pp. 17-20, 1983 03~~8/83~01~t7~~03.00/0

Printed in the USA. All rights reserved. Copyright @ 1983 Pergamon Press Ltd

ART LIBRARIES: COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT IN THE 1980s

THE JOBBER AS A SURROGATE ACQ~SI~ONS L~RARIAN

DOUGLAS DUCHIN

Vice-President, Blanket Order Division

Yankee Book Peddler

Contoocook, NH 03229

Book jobbers probably form the largest acquisitions department in the world, purchasing millions of dollars worth of books every year from thousands of publishing bodies. We jobbers have become very good at it. The problems, such as a title change or fraudulent publisher, which librarians see once, we see a hundred times over. We may consider these a problem the first few times we encounter them, but after that we can turn around rapidly and tell you exactly what is going to go wrong with a specific title. Since we’ve become, in essence, a large acquisitions department, we can see a problem coming a mile away!

We not only fend for librarians in the market, but can also act on their behalf and become an extension of the library through acquisitions plans. Many, many approval plans were initiated in the 1960s as a response to book budgets which grew rapidly without a commensurate growth in personnel budgets. Many of these early programs were crude, comprehensive, unrefined gathering plans geared to bring in as many new books as possible with a minimum of effort. As budgets grew tighter the programs became more refined and selective.

Today we are running into a problem similar to the bodies-to-books ratio of the 1960s. In most institutions that I deal with, I am seeing a major cutback in personnel, coupled with book budgets that remain the same or actually increase. The government programs that brought CETA and other government-funded personnel are being slashed and we now are faced with libraries without a clerk in sight. The cuts in clerical personnel have an impact on the time of the remaining staff. A librarian who once had the luxury of curling up with a new Abrams catalog is now occupied with filing catalog cards and claiming serial standing orders. The Abrams catalog gets looked at on the subway on the way to work.

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The solution, once more, is a gathering plan. The gathering plan of today must be much more refined than the plans of the 1960s and more restrictive as to subjects, presses, prices and formats. Certainly such plans increase the demand for reports from vendors.

What little money there is for library acquisitions is watched very carefully. Librarians are demanding many more services for their dollars. It is the job of the vendor to work with the library to help balance the publishing volume with the library’s manpower. In essence, when you hire a jobber you are hiring extra librarians, especially when you are involved in an approval plan.

I work with acquisitions plans of every type from blanket orders to serial standing orders. I find the biggest problem is the exchange of information. If the library does not convey to me its hopes and wants and fears, we are going to have a poor plan. If I am not honest with the library as to what I can and cannot do well, we are going to have a poor plan.

The exchange of i~ormation with the vendor is essential. The vendor should have not only a profile, but, in the case of academic institutions, a copy of the course catalog. Conversation! Talk to your vendor because that is the only way the program will work. Call the vendor daily if you have to; claim material, especially at the beginning of the program. Every item discussed gives added dimension to the program and allows important nuances to be developed. Don’t smoulder and wonder if a title is going to come on your plan. The vendor may know much more about the title than you do; for example, if the item being sold as the exhibition catalog for the Dutch Silver Exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts was already several years old and has been published abroad. Without the book in hand, the librarian with a standing order for all MFA catalogs would expect the vendor to supply this catalog. If the vendor had supplied this catalog without querying first, the librarian could have very easily ended up with a duplicate of an item already in his collection. As part of the exchange of information, the vendor should have let the librarian know the status of the catalog within a week of the show’s opening and should have provided the option of selecting or rejecting the title. That is the advantage of having a middleman to protect you from costly and irritating selection mistakes.

Whether a librarian chooses to use the vendor for approval plans or not, he or she can still reap a number of rewards from working through a vendor by cutting down on the number of pieces of paper handled and the number of jiffy bags opened, and by establishing a single or limited number of sources for ordering and claiming. The end result is that you save a great deal of money.

Obviously it is cheaper to write one check for 100 books that all arrived in one box with one postage charge and probably no handling fee than to write 100 checks and mail them to 100 publishers-not to mention the time spent in opening those one hundred jiffy bags. The claiming of shipping errors require more letters and phone calls to myriad publishers versus one toll-free call to the vendor or one claim letter per month. I have clients who say they can get a better discount from the publishers; that may be true on the surface but not at the bottom line. If you yourself are not writing the checks or handing the material shipped in error, it may well look as though you are saving money. Somewhere in your organization, however, you have lost that small percentage of saving simply by handling too many bits of paper.

If a library has decided to institute an approval or other type of gathering plan, the savings begin to mount up. The labor involved in selection, pre-order searching and verification, ordering, and receiving a firm-ordered title may cost as much as $10. The approval book actually costs a quarter of the price because you have eliminated the labor involved in several steps.

The Jobber as Surrogate Acquisitions Librarian 19

In respect to timeliness, the approval plan definitely works to the library’s advantage. If a vendor is covering certain presses, galleries, and museums for the library, that vendor has standing orders with these museums, galleries and presses. He is thus insured of receiving a title as soon as it is available. I am sure that all librarians have had the experience of finding somewhere on their desks an announcement of an exhibition that is several weeks old. An order for the catalog is rushed to the gallery and the gallery returns the order six weeks later with a note requesting payment proforma because a single copy has been ordered. By the time you get a check-if your institution even allows you to write proforma checks-and again rush the order off, you may learn that the stock is sold out, but the gallery would be happy to send you a photocopy, at 2% per page, as soon as Mrs. Smith gets back from Brazil (no one else seems to be able to make photocopies as well as Mrs. Smith). If the library had an approval plan, the vendor would have supplied the catalog and would have taken care of the proforma charges as well.

One of the side effects of working with a vendor on an acquisitions plan is that the library-often for the first time-really articulates its collection policy. I’ve met with librarians at universities who did not know what graduate programs were being taught. I’ve also met with librarians who had such grandiose collection development schemes that they would have spent their entire annual budget each year fulfilling their plan. This doesn’t happen too often, but it does happen and the dialogue between the vendor and the library can often lead to a very fruitful relationship in which priorities are established and goals are set to mutual advantage.

There are times when working through a vendor can work to the disadvantage of the library. If you need the book tomorrow and it is not a specialty of the vendor or a current title, you will probably lose time going through a vendor. You mail an order to him, he mails it to the publisher, the publisher mails the book and the vendor passes it on to you. A lot of time can be lost this way and there is very little the vendor can do in such a case.

One objection that comes up again and again is that the professional librarian, regardless of subject area, feels that some clerk in the jobber’s office is selecting books for the library and “how can that clerk possibly know what the library needs?’

First of all, it is not some clerk. I suspect that all vendors have operations similar to ours and have hired professional librarians to profile for libraries and to buy for the vendor’s stock. In essence, the vendor is simply running a massive acquisitions department and passing his knowledge and buying power along to you. If you are honest and reasonable with the vendor in your demands and expectations, I think you will find that the experience can be very positive.

If you notice that your library has missed ten titles out of 3000 and you see that as a major gap in the plan, then your library probably should not have an acquisitions program with a vendor. There will always be gaps based on taste, style and interpretation as to what constitutes a textbook or an undergraduate-level work.

If you want a successful program, you must let the vendor do what a vendor does best. Let him buy the new and obvious titles, and leave collection development, in the truest sense of the word, to the library.

At least SO%, if not more, of what you buy is bought almost by rote. This percentage falls into a pattern of the same publishers, authors, subject areas and formats year after year. This is the percentage a vendor via an approval plan can handle for the library. The librarian then handles the remainder of the selection, quite frankly the dun part: the business of filling in gaps in the collection, developing support for a changing curriculum and searching for hard- to-locate materials. This is not to say that you can’t order such material through a vendor;

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you can and should. But the point is that the function of the approval plan is to take care of the obvious.

I’d like to make one last point about vendors-they are not out to take you for a ride. Most operate on a very narrow profit margin and often find themselves more in competition with manufacturers and publishers than with each other. Vending is a service profession and most of us are in it for the challenge and because we are service oriented. Vending is similar to running a multimillion dollar acquisitions department without ever having to worry about where you’re going to shelve the books.