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Posts Tagged ‘acquisitions’

New developments in on-demand purchasing

Posted in ★ The Essentials
November 13th, 2009 by Joy Pile

Below is an article from LJ – published today. Please comment – but should we also schedule a “brown bag” discussion – and ask Joe for some hard figures about how much various ILL items cost?

–Joy

Time and Tools Are Ripe for On-Demand Acquisitions, Say Charleston Speakers

Models removes guesswork and can save money over ILL, especially when the process is simplified for the end user

Josh Hadro — Library Journal, 11/12/2009

Go back to the
Academic Newswire
for more stories <http://www.libraryjournal.com/eNewsletter/CA6706861/2673.html>

Collection development librarians: predicting use is ineffective
Supply chain improvements and e-access make on-demand viable
Software tool collapses distinction between ILL and purchase requests

While the notion of “just-in-time” acquisitions has generated buzz at professional meetings for some years, readily available pilot program data and maturing software tools are paving the way for more institutions to move away from the traditional “just-in-case” model.

Demand-driven collection policies and procedures were the focus of five sessions over three days last week at the recent Charleston Conference <http://www.katina.info/conference/> (on “issues in book and serials acquisions”) and favorably mentioned in many others. With growing support from ebook, journal, and print monograph publishers, it’s become much easier for collection development librarians to let user requests drive purchases rather than rely on librarians’ predictive abilities.

“We are not good predictors of use,” acknowledged University of Vermont <http://www.uvm.edu> acquisitions and preservation librarian Albert Joy, who, along with collection development librarian Peter Spitzform, described their library’s Order on Demand Project. The university has purchased more than 600 books since 2007 prompted directly by user requests.

With records for readily available materials from a number of publishers—including Wiley, Oxford, and MacMillian—loaded into the catalog, graduate students and researchers can readily identify new works relevant to their research interest. Moreover, they can treat them as they would any other material not held locally by the university.

In the mind of the end user, there is essentially no difference between “off-site” and “not-yet-purchased,” said Joy, especially now that e-access has come into its own, and it’s less likely that materials will go out of print. The materials purchased via the pilot program circulate, on average, more than twice as often as other monographs, the presenters said.

GIST of Geneseo
In part echoing the observations made by Joy and Spitzform that users are indifferent to the source of materials, a team of librarians and programmers at the State University of New York (SUNY) Geneseo <http://www.geneseo.edu/> is working to collapse workflow distinction between content acquired by inter-library loan (ILL) and ordered from outside sources like Amazon.

Tim Bowersox, Cyril Oberlander, Kate Pitcher, and Mark Sullivan of SUNY Geneseo’s Milne Library described the Getting It System Toolkit <http://idsproject.org/Tools/GIST.aspx> (GIST), a software package is designed to merge “acquisitions and ILL request workflow using one interface, enabling user-initiated requests, coordinated collection development and acquisitions.”

<http://idsproject.org/Tools/GIST.aspx>The first version of GIST, released in August, combines ILL and purchase request options on a single interface for the user, and integrates on the back end with OCLC’s ILLiad resource sharing management software. The request screen, linked from the catalog or discovery interface, includes sections highlighting holdings, preview or full-text options from sources like Google and the Internet Archive if available, Amazon reviews, and pricing details from a variety of booksellers.

Behind the scenes, the software directs the user’s request to a librarian and helps that librarian weigh whether to purchase the item or submit it as an ILL request; it displaysWorldCat holdings availability as well as the price of alternatives to ILL in case a purchase can save money and time over borrowing from another institution.

Version one of the GIST software is available for download at the project’s site <http://toolkit.idsproject.org/doku.php?id=wiki:gist>. Version two will be a standalone application, and is expected to be released in August 2010.

Contact the author: josh.hadro@reedbusiness.com <mailto:josh.hadro@reedbusiness.com>

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Major Library Acquisitions for FY10

Posted in Collection Management ★ The Essentials
October 8th, 2009 by jtoth

The library purchases most of its big-ticket items in June, the end of the fiscal year, after invoices for expenditures have been received and paid, when we know precisely what’s left to spend. In May, we sort through requests to purchase databases, journals and other resources and rank them by need as best as we can; we also review low-use subscription resources to determine if we may cancel any to clear space in this account for new acquisitions. (At present, there are two ways to acquire a new subscription database: to cancel an old one or to reduce the book fund permanently by the cost of the new database.) Here are big-ticket items acquired last June for FY10:

Periodicals Archive Online Collection Extensions.
PAO is an archive of hundreds of digitized, full-image articles published in journals of the arts, humanities and social sciences, providing access to more than 200 years of scholarship. Earliest PAO journals begin in 1802; we advanced coverage of this collection by five years, from 1995 to 2000.
Link: http://biblio.middlebury.edu/record=b2117470~S2

Oxford Encyclopedia of Popular Music Online. The 10-volume Encyclopedia of Popular Music is a comprehensive reference work devoted exclusively to popular music. In addition to being regularly updated, it will also be fully cross-searchable with Grove Music Online in the new Oxford Music Online gateway.
Link: http://biblio.middlebury.edu/record=b1569964~S2

Godey’s Lady’s Book Folios. Godey’s Lady’s Book, a 19th century magazine for women, was the most successful women’s magazine in the United States by the outbreak of the Civil War, with a circulation of 150,000 and an estimated readership of a million persons. We acquired folios VII (1886-1889) and VIII (1892, 1893, 1896) to complete the run of this publication.
Link: http://biblio.middlebury.edu/record=b2129257~S2

–Joe Toth

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Acquisitions

Posted in Collection Management ★ The Essentials
August 14th, 2008 by Doreen Bernier

Submitted by Bill Warren

As mentioned in a Collection Development report in a recent LISt, we have adopted a new fund structure for the library-materials budget, as of the start of the new fiscal year. We heretofore had two large parallel sets of funds, one for discretionary purchases (one-time purchases), and the other for continuing obligations (subscriptions, etc.). Each of these sets had a separate fund for each subject area. For example, we had a Biology discretionary fund (”biodi”) and a Biology continuing fund (”bioco”), and so on, for each of our subjects. In all, we had well over 100 separate funds.

We decided to stop allocating funds by subject, and have only a single fund for all discretionary purchases, and a single fund for all continuing obligations (with the exception of a couple of endowed funds, which we wanted to keep separate). In order for payments after the changeover to be applied against the new funds, we had to figure out a way to change the old fund in each of our outstanding order records (that is, order records that are not closed or completed) to one of the new funds.

We have two basic categories of order records. The first is for discretionary (one-time) purchases. When an order record is created, an estimated price is entered, which encumbers (sets aside) that sum in the appropriate fund. When the item is received and paid for, the money set aside is disencumbered and paid out, and the order is closed. The second type of order, for continuing commitments (subscriptions), operates differently. No estimated price is entered, and thus no money is encumbered. Each annual renewal, or each successive volume received, is invoiced against this same order record, which can be used for a number of years, rather than one having to create a new order record for each annual renewal or new volume. At the time of the changeover to the new fund structure, we had about 5,000 orders outstanding: either orders for one-time purchases that had not been received, or continuing orders for subscriptions.

Unfortunately, it is normally not possible to globally change the funds in order records, to avoid the danger of inadvertently wreaking widespread financial havoc within the acquisitions system. The only exception is that during the course of one of three fiscal closing procedures (the process of closing out the accounts for one fiscal year and starting the new fiscal year), wholesale changing of funds in outstanding order records is allowed.

This fiscal closing method is not the one we normally use, and is not really designed for the purpose we had in mind, but documentation and the experience of others indicated that it would accomplish our end.

So, as part of the fiscal-close process, we undertook to change all our outstanding orders from their original subject fund to the appropriate new fund, which meant changing the orders attached to over 50 old discretionary funds to the single new all-inclusive discretionary fund, and doing the same with all outstanding continuing orders. Readers will be spared numbing detail; suffice it to say that the process worked only partially, and was considerably more labor-intensive and tedious than we had hoped. The funds in outstanding discretionary orders were converted to the new fund, but encumbrances were not carried forward, and had to be reconstructed. To our dismay, the funds were not converted for the continuing orders, which unfortunately is the far-more-numerous category: about 4,000 outstanding records. Since global update could not be used, the funds had to be changed manually, one by one. Happily, a number of volunteers came forward, including a couple from outside our department (our fervent thanks go to Mike Lynch and Joe Toth) and in a frenzy of creating lists and editing records the group converted all the continuing order records to their new fund in a single morning. The changeover is now complete, and we are operating with the two new all-inclusive funds.

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