The Relevance of vertical files in the modern library media

McAbee, Pat. The Relevance of Vertical Files in the Modern Library Media. Book Report, Nov/Dec. 99.

When a devastating fire gutted Princess Anne High School in Virginia Beach, Virginia, on September 1, 1995, much of the school lay in ruin. Built in 1954, the oldest high school in Virginia Beach lost 27 classrooms, the cafeteria, administrative offices, and the newly remodeled library media center (LMC). A combination of fire, smoke, and water destroyed the entire library collection.

Rebuilding the collection presented the library staff with unique opportunities as well as overwhelming challenges. While most school libraries are slowly making the transition from a traditional setting to an increasingly technologically advanced media center, the Princess Anne library was thrust into the 21st century overnight.

Although deciding to replace outdated or unused equipment and books (no more 16mm film projectors and 1940 copyrighted books!) wasn’t difficult, other considerations, such as whether to invest in the enormous effort of rebuilding the vertical files, were not so simple.

The rationale for vertical files
Before the fire, more than 300 vertical, or information, files filled four large file cabinets. National, state, and local issues were covered, arranged alphabetically by subject. If students needed information on freedom of speech, they could find it in the “Censorship” file. Charter schools? Check the “Education” file. PETA issues? See “Animal Rights.” Embassy bombings? Try the “Terrorism” file. Even body piercing (yes, a student asked) – look in “Fads.”

With the amount of new technology currently available for research, why keep the vertical files? With hundreds of databases from which to choose, accessibility to the Internet, and newspapers and magazine indexes on CD-ROM, is it worth the time to maintain these files?

Even with multiple electronic sources, the vertical files are an indispensable reference tool for the following reasons:

Student accessibility.
Students who are assigned to do research on current issues may be limited by the number and availability of computers. Although other sources may be available, our library has only six computers with Internet access, so most of the students in a class of 30 would have to wait for computer access if we did away with the vertical files. They provide an opportunity for many students to do research simultaneously.

Supplement to the school curricula.
The library media specialist can save valuable time by keeping files on topics that teachers assign year after year. Our science curriculum, for example, includes a unit on genetic diseases, so a corresponding vertical file was created, full of current research that supplements our print sources. Also, as new textbooks are regularly adopted by schools, it isn’t possible for the library collection to keep pace with the most current curriculum needs. The vertical files are a valuable supplement until funds become available to update the book collection to meet new and constantly changing curriculum requirements.

Local topics.
Students researching local and regional issues may be frustrated by the lack of information found on even the most advanced technology in the LMC.
Often the only sources on issues such as school board decisions, a proposal for a national sports arena in a nearby town, crimes committed in our city, or local politics may be the vertical files.

Limited financial resources.
As costs continue to rise and local library funds decrease, every penny counts. Library media specialists must be more and more resourceful in spending money. Vertical files include clipped newspaper articles, brochures, pamphlets, and other free print materials, leaving library funds for other needed purchases.

Vertical file guidelines

1. Keep the files current. Files should be weeded when they are no longer relevant. Outdated or wrong information is worse than none, as students will assume the material contained in the files is current and accurate. Maintaining obsolete files takes up needed space and valuable time. While files on the Exxon oil spill and the O. J. Simpson trial should be kept as historical resources, new files on Election 2000, the Y2K problem, and cloning should be added. In addition, articles within each file should be reviewed periodically. Is the list of animals in the “Endangered Species” file still current? Does the “AIDS” file reflect the latest research findings?
2. Maintain a balance. Both sides of controversial issues should be represented. Strive to maintain balanced views on provocative issues such as gun control, the death penalty, and school prayer. Personal political, social, or religious views of the library staff should not be evident from the vertical files.
3. Be selective. Topics easily found in other sources should not be included in the vertical files. Is there really a need for a voluminous file on the Clinton administration when so much information is readily available? On the other hand, don’t create a file if there isn’t enough justification for it. A list of hurricane names through the year 2002 (which I found) may be interesting, but I would not create a “Hurricane” file to accommodate it. Start a “Miscellaneous” file for odds and ends.
4. Consolidate/divide space. Smaller, related topics can often be grouped in one file, saving space and providing easier access for students. Anorexia, bulimia, binge eating, and dieting can all be combined in an “Eating Disorders” file. Conversely, if there is enough information on a subject to fill several files, subdivide them into smaller ones for a more narrowly defined search within a broader topic. For example, “Environment” can be divided into “Environmental Pollution,” “Environmental Organizations,” “Environmental Policy,” and “Environmental Activists.” In our library, the Chesapeake Bay is a popular and often researched topic, reflected in our rather extensive (13) subdivided files.
5. Keep a current subject index. Frequently updated lists of all files should be kept within easy reach, allowing students to scan and locate subjects quickly. Topics are easily added or deleted if the print information is also saved to a disk. Vertical file topics can also be added to the automated catalog database, where they can be accessed by subject or keyword.
6. Use “See” and “See also” references. Cross references are useful to students as they search the subject index and files. A student may be unaware that information on the death penalty is located in the “Capital Punishment” file, an article on smoking is under “Tobacco Industry,” and birth control facts are in “Family Planning”. Students may not ask for help, leaving the library without needed information if not for the “see” and “see also” clues to lead them to their topic. A student researching AIDS may be directed by a “see also” reference to the “Sexually Transmitted Disease” file, finding even more information for research.
7. Rotate the responsibility for maintaining the files. The staff member responsible for maintaining the vertical files will usually be the most informed about them and therefore most able to help students find what they need. Rotating this job is a good idea, as each library media specialist will influence the size, scope, and content of the files, resulting in a more balanced and comprehensive collection.
8. Create a uniform labeling system. Having the file name, source, date, and school name on each piece of information makes for easy checkout to students and easy refiling. Labeling each piece of material in red ink and purchasing a preprinted “Vertical files” stamp is useful. Don’t forget that student and adult library volunteers can be trained to label and stamp materials, keep the files in alphabetical order, and refile.
9. Designate a collection location. Although collecting, organizing, labeling, weeding, and filing materials on a weekly basis is the ideal, it isn’t always possible. As you gather bits and pieces of information, keep a box or basket on your desk to store items for later processing. Then, when useful material is found by any staff member, it can be added to the growing pile.
10. Always be on the lookout for information. From medical pamphlets donated by the public health department to reprints of journal articles to free governmental publications, collect material from a variety of sources. In addition to local and national newspapers, maps, posters, and newsletters, I regularly cull material from my home issues of Life, Readers’ Digest, and Southern Living. Solicit brochures from businesses and nonprofit organizations, gather pamphlets and handouts from conferences, and request free materials whenever possible.

Vertical files continue to serve a useful purpose in the modern LMC, addressing specific curriculum needs, supplementing existing reference sources, and further stretching limited library funds. With time-saving tips and organizational guidelines, maintaining files that are current, balanced, and easily accessible to students are well worth the effort.

By Pat McAbee.

Pat McAbee is a Library Media Specialist at Princess Anne High School in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Vertical files

Anderson, Cynthia. Vertical files. Book Report, Nov/Dec 2001, Vol. 20, Issue 3.

Okay, let’s face it. As library media specialists, we love vertical files – they’re in our blood. To clip or not to clip? What’s a gal or guy to do?

Have you looked in those vertical file (VF) drawers lately? Are the newspaper articles yellow and crumbly like Aunt Alice’s Apple Betty? Are the pamphlets staler than Grandma’s drop cakes? Count the stars on the flag in that picture. Are there only 48? It may be time to weed the vertical file. More shocking still, it may be time to disassemble the vertical file. You be the judge.

Why continue the vertical file? There are several well-reasoned arguments one could make for continuing to maintain the vertical file. Some of them are:

Ageless information. If you find yourself taking three or four brochures each time you visit a historic site, a new museum, or the local-interest brochure rack in a hotel lobby, you may have a genetic predisposition to maintain a vertical file. Some topics, such as information on state and national parks or historic sites, don’t age as quickly as others and could reside usefully in the vertical file for an extended period of time.

Local history. Information on state and local history isn’t plentiful on the Internet. Local-interest stories are more rare still. If your community sponsors an annual yodeling festival and yam-baking contest, chances are slim that the organizers have posted an informational Web page. Your “Yodeling-Yam-Baking” folder in the vertical file may be the best information source around. Did your town have a gala centennial or sesquicentennial celebration? If so, the supporting materials, pictures, etc. have probably earned a place of honor in your vertical file and may be helpful to the next big event planners.

District history. The latest school-district news, or information on the history of the school district, also usually can’t be found on the Internet. Few schools and districts have the people power or the computer-server space to offer an extensive history of the institution, including documents such as district annual reports and programs from past events. Storing those in your vertical file can be a sensible and serviceable way for your library media center to serve as school history center.

Primary sources. Primary source documents don’t grow on trees. If you have a collection of letters from the trenches in WWII, they’re treasures. The vertical file is the perfect coffer for sacred primary sources or facsimiles thereof. Every community has primary-source documents, and your school library media center can be an excellent repository for them.

Biographies of local heroes. Biographies of graduates, alumni, staff, and school families can be helpful documents to the school event planning and recognition community. If your community boasts a war hero, Pulitzer Prize winning author, or other dignitary, you may want to maintain biographical information on the local hero in your vertical file.

Teachers’ pet projects. Does one of your faculty members teach a special unit every year for which you have been collecting special brochures, pamphlets, and other resources since 1957? As long as that teacher teaches that unit, chances are excellent that students will be expected to use those old favorites from your vertical file and cite them in their bibliographies. Just thinking of tossing those treasures might be a dangerous threat to your library media center public relations plan.

Why discontinue the vertical file? On the other hand, some library media specialists are considering the possibility of eliminating the vertical file. Principle reasons include:

Internet access. Periodical database subscriptions offer more current information on most of the topics that can be found in even the best-maintained vertical file. For many of our budget-fortunate colleagues, the prevalence of online databases offers a viable replacement to much of the content in the vertical file. An Internet search can knock the informational socks off most our vertical files.

People power. There are too few remaining library media center volunteers, clerks, or student assistants who can assist with clipping, labeling, indexing, and filing the vertical-file ephemera. Done properly, the vertical file can be an extremely high-maintenance operation.

Changes in curriculum. Even curriculum changes over time. Current grade-level social studies curriculum is a much different chunk of content from that of the 1980s, for instance. The support material that you’ve safely harbored in the vertical file for so long may no longer be relevant or current. Curriculum changes can be subtle and occur over long periods of time. It may be time to take a look at the vertical file from the perspective of congruence to the curriculum.

Why not compromise? Why not consider taking some steps down both of the paths considered above – continuing to maintain a vertical file but making it a lean, mean, streamlined version? Weed some materials but save others. Some of us secretly want to get rid of the vertical file but aren’t ready to take that huge leap yet. Taking the compromise action of slimming the vertical file collection may be the best answer for those of us in this category.

How to weed the vertical file They say the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. That’s probably the easiest and most efficient way to weed the vertical file, too.

Set a schedule. I like to set a weeding schedule for myself and put it in my planner or personal digital assistant (PDA). Make the schedule achievable. If you have three, three-drawer file cabinets, you could promise yourself to weed a drawer a month in the new school year. Or you could talk yourself into weeding the S’s, the E’s, the P’s, and the T’s, in September, the O’s, the C’s, and the T’s in October, etc. Whatever plan you set for yourself, write it down; make a commitment.

Break it down. Another method of bite-by-bite weeding is to pack one letter or section of the VF into a portable milk carton-type file box and take it home or to your workroom. Sort and organize as you watch a little public television or monitor the reading room. Toss dated material. Identify items you plan to give to teachers or students. Make another stack of items you wish to store in the newer, slimmer vertical files.

Shrink the vertical file. Once you’ve weeded the dated materials and significantly culled expendable items from the collection, you’re at the glorious spot where you’re ready to reduce your number of storage units. If you find that it’s possible to condense and streamline your vertical file, you can gain:

1. Floor space;
2. A spare file cabinet or two for the back room;
3. Fewer chores (clipping, mounting, indexing).

Each of us has different needs in our school library media center and each of us holds different opinions about the value of maintaining a vertical file. Consider your options and make the choice to eliminate, reduce, or continue to maintain the vertical file based on your special needs and your professional judgment.

By Cynthia Anderson
Cynthia Anderson is Director Media Services at Indian Creek Technology Center in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, and can be reached at cyndeeanderson@smsd.org

Vertical files

A collection of loose clippings, pictures, illustrations, pamphlets, or other materials of an ephemeral nature which, because of their size and format, are filed on their edges in drawers or in a box, usually organized in folders by subject or some other classification system to facilitate reference. Also refers to the cabinet with drawers in which such materials are stored.

ODLIS: Online Dictionary of Library and Information Science http://lu.com/odlis/odlis_v.cfm

Why vertical files?

• Current
• Cheap/free
• Easily retrieved
• usually by topic
• Variety of sources
• pamphlet
• photo
• support group
• Meet infrequent demand
• Easy to organize

Characteristics of vertical file material

• Fit in vertical file cabinet
• Offer unique information
• different viewpoints not accessible elsewhere
• Focus on small part of knowledge
• Provide current information
• Have short shelf life
• Have appealing format
• attractive
• Available from non-traditional library sources
• Free or inexpensive

To build a vertical file you need

• Commitment
• files need to be kept up to date once started
• Budgeted funds
• Space
• filing cabinets
• Time

Selected sources

• Newspapers
• Governments (all levels)
• Foundations, associations, societies
• Semi-government bodies (e.g. hydro)
• How to save water
• Banks, credit unions
• Company annual reports
• Manufacturer’s brochures
• Periodical articles
• Chamber of Commerce
• Doctor, dentist, health office, pharmacy
• Grocery store
• Police, fire station
• Travel agents
• Fairs
• Place mats

Selection

• Establish guidelines for acquisition and retention
• see attached guidelines adapted from Sitter
• Include your collection development priorities in guidelines
• Start with a few kinds of materials and expand slowly

How to prepare a request

• Use institutional letterhead
• Identify yourself as part of the library
• Keep request brief
• Designate a particular person, position, or collection to receive materials
• Include a mailing label for faster returns
• Saves mistakes
• If asked, send a stamped address envelope
• Ask to be put on mailing lists for free materials
• Use readers’ services postcards in magazine
• If materials marked with restrictions such as “for teachers only” explain you serve teachers
• Ask for specific titles. Word requests to include new titles on same subject
• Be clear about topics of interest when making a subject request
• Be aware of junk mail. Don’t be too general and ask for everything.
• Avoid vague requests

Keep track of orders

• Mark entries when ordering from a list
• Know dates
• Record important requests
• Use a tickler file for items requested on a regular basis (e.g. annual reports)
• Reminder file
• Use a check-in program/card for regularly issued items (e.g. university catalogues)
• Keep a source file if you order frequently from a source
• Set up a computer file to track orders

Ordering

• Keep ordering process simple
• Order groups of material when appropriate

Processing/labeling

• Put name/address of source and cost on each item
• Lets patrons know how to access the source. Put the address on if it’s not there
• Stamp each item with name/address of library, date received
• Helps with weeding. Know it was valid material when received
• Place assigned heading in standard location (hand/computer printed labels)
• Process for circulation, e.g. barcode, or reference

Organization

• Choose a plan appropriate for your collection
• Select an authority for subject headings with provision for modification
• Provide an index for users

Advantages of subject organization

• Direct easily understood access
• Allows for easy integration or withdrawal of material
• Author/title access rarely required
• Rarely looking for something specific
• Can use existing standard subject heading schemes and their cross-references
• Sears
• Library of Congress

Sample subject heading sources

• Sears List of Subject Headings
• Library of Congress Subject Headings
• Indexes, abstracts, e.g. Readers’ Guide, Applied Science & Technology Index, Art Index, etc.
• Subject thesauri, e.g. Thesaurus of ERIC Descriptors, MeSH (Medical Subject Headings)

Preservation and protection

• Consider preservation and protection when processing new items
• Estimate shelf life and use of item to determine if protection necessary
• Preservation and protection methods
• Flat single items
• Photocopying (standardizes size of clipping)
• gives more stability
• allows you to place date and newspaper on item
• Plastic covers
• Envelopes
• Mounting
• Laminating
• does not preserve
• Encapsulation
• seals item from the world

Housing

• Decide on best height, width, colour, style for cabinets and be consistent
• There are a range of cabinets available
• All cost money and take up room
• Consider smaller cabinets for elementary school students
• Use appropriate internal devices
• e.g. hanging hooks
• Use bold, large print labels and guides

Promotion

• Make files visually attractive
• Make collection easy to find and easy to use
• Tell users about your vertical file materials
• Integrate headings in catalogue
• Use items yourself in displays, exhibits, answering questions

Circulation

• Establish circulation policies
• Choose a simple circulation system

Weeding

• Establish a policy and procedure for weeding
• Don’t let it grow forever. If necessary, put it on microfiche, for example.
• Keep files “lean and clean”
• Set up a plan for systematic weeding and schedule it into your work day, month or year

Purpose of weeding

• To ensure quality of vertical file as a resource
• To make collection more appealing
• To conserve space
• To save time in searching and maintaining collection
• To keep close check on collection
• To provide feedback on strengths and weaknesses of collection

Weeding considerations

• Material out of date?
• Applies to non-archival collection
• In need of repair/replacement
• Newer information?
• Subject headings up-to-date?
• Folder too full?

Electronic vertical file

Hamilton Public Library. Virtual Vertical File. http://web.archive.org/web/20040224102119/http://www.hpl.hamilton.on.ca/history/default.htm

Montgomery County Public Schools. Digital Vertical File. http://web.archive.org/web/20071029095707/http://montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/web/dvf/

Bunker Hill Community College. Virtual Vertical File: Selected Sites from the World Wide Web by Subject. http://www.noblenet.org/bhcc/virtualverticalfile.htm

Supplementary information sources

Vertical files Anderson, Cynthia. “Vertical Files.” Book Report 20.3 (Nov./Dec. 2001) 36 (2 pp.) Academic Search Premier. EBSCOhost.

McAbee, Pat. “The Relevance of Vertical Files in the Modern Library Media Center.” Book Report 18.3 (Nov./Dec. 1999) 23 (3 pp.) Academic Search Premier. EBSCOhost.

Non-Print “Audio Books and Tapes, Publishers and Vendors.” 8 Dec. 2001. The AcqWeb Directory. 8 Mar. 2004. http://acqweb.org/pubr/audio.html Booklist
See also website http://web.archive.org/web/20040417175440/http://www.ala.org/ala/booklist/speciallists/speciallistsandfeatures2/mediaspecial.htm

California Learning Resource Network. 8 Mar 2004. http://www.clrn.org/search/
A searchable database of electronic learning resource reviews for items that support California’s K-12 curriculum. Resources are preselected. The database has in-depth search options.

Canadian Educational Video and Film Distributors. 29 Apr. 2003. Manitoba Education Training and Youth. Instructional Resources. Library Publications. 8 Mar. 2004. http://web.archive.org/web/20031003102343/http://www.edu.gov.mb.ca/ks4/iru/publications/cdndistrib/index.html

CM. 8 Mar. 2004. http://www.umanitoba.ca/cm/
Includes reviews of non-print media as well as Canadian books. No overall index. Creative looks.

Educational Media Reviews Online. 12 Dec. 2003. 8 Mar. 2004. http://emro.lib.buffalo.edu/emro/
A database of reviews of videos, DVDs and CD-ROMs from major educational and documentary distributors. The electronic magazine is aimed at the post secondary level.

Educators Guide to Free Films, Filmstrips and Slides Ref LB 1043.8 E4

Educators Guide to Free Videotapes: Elementary/Middle School Edition Ref LB 1044.7 E491

Educators Guide to Free Videotapes: Secondary Edition. Ref LB 1044.75 E49

Eisenhower National Clearinghouse: Curriculum Resources. 8 Mar. 2004. http://www.enc.org/resources/
A collection of math and science materials including print materials, software, CD-ROMs, kits, videos and other types of nonprint media along with thousands of Internet sites in a searchable database. Sponsored by the U.S. government.

EvaluTech. Southern Regional Education Board. 8 Mar. 2004. http://www.sreb.org/page/1379/98t08_Evalutech.html
A searchable database of software, books and videotapes recommended for K-12.

Films for the Humanities & Sciences. 8 Mar. 2004. http://ffh.films.com/
Catalogue of video, CD-ROM and videodisc programs appropriate for schools, colleges and public libraries.

Homa, Linda L. Elementary School Library Collection. 21st ed. Williamsport, PA: Brodart, 1998. Ref Z 1037 E4 1998
Provides a selective listing of children’s books, periodicals and audiovisual and computer materials.

Internet Library for Librarians: Acquisitions, Serials and Collection Development: Book and Non-Book Review Services. InfoWorks Technology Company. 8 Mar. 2004.
http://www.itcompany.com/inforetriever/acq_revw.htm

Kids First. Coalition for Quality Children’s Media. 8 Mar. 2004. http://www.cqcm.org/kidsfirst/start.html
More than 3,000 reviews of films, videos, DVD, audio recordings, TV programs and CD-ROMs.

Library Journal Accessible through EBSCOhost.

Media Literacy Television, Video and Film Resources. 18 Apr. 2002. Manitoba Education, Training and Youth. Instructional Resources. Library Publications. 8 Mar. 2004.
http://www.edu.gov.mb.ca/k12/iru/access/resources/medialit/index.html
Includes links to video and film reviews.

Media Review Digest Reviews of educational and entertainment media, 1989 to present. Available on OCLC FirstSearch.

Music, Audio and Video Resources. Auburn University Libraries. 8 Mar. 2004. http://www.lib.auburn.edu/acquisitions/docs/music.php

National Film Board of Canada. 8 Mar. 2004. http://www.nfb.ca

NICEM Film & Video Finder Online. 8 Mar. 2004. http://www.nicem.com/
Subscription bibliographic database. Covers educational, documentary, instructional, vocational, and informational materials along with motivational and recreation programming, genre classics, and independent avant-garde productions.
A source for both new materials and archival media, including slide sets, records, audiocassettes, 8 mm film cartridges, overhead transparencies, kits, and models.

Resources for Information Specialist Role. 2001. Baltimore County Public Schools. 8 Mar. 2004. http://web.archive.org/web/20080324140952/http://www.bcps.org/offices/lis/office/infospec.html
Hyperlinks to review resources for school media specialists, including ordering materials. Includes software reviewing sites.

The Review Zone. Tina Velgos. 8 Mar. 2004. http://www.thereviewzone.com/reviews-index.html
The Review Zone’s mission is to provide in-depth reviews on “the best” kids’ and family entertainment software, hardware, computer books and cutting edge technology for parents and teachers.

School Library Journal.
Science Books & Films Review journal from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Covers all ages.
Video Librarian. 29 Jun 2000. Library, University of California Berkeley. 8 Mar. 2004. http://web.archive.org/web/20071116051107/http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/VideoLibrarian.html Selected reviews from journal mounted at University of California Berkeley, Media Resource Center Website. Use search function to find titles held by media center. Reviews sometimes included.

Video Librarian Online. 8 Mar. 2004. http://www.videolibrarian.com/
Electronic addendum to the print magazine Video Librarian. Provides new video and DVD reviews not included in the most recent issue.

Video Source Book Ref PN 1992.95 V53

Also check databases found on EBSCOhost, CBCA, etc. for reviews from periodicals.

TV networks often list programmes and related AV products available for sale, e.g. CBC, TV Ontario, History Television, BBC, A&E, etc.

You may also wish to check the catalogues of libraries which actively acquire nonprint media e.g. Manitoba Education, Training and Youth, Instructional Resources Library, Winnipeg Public Library, Red River College Library, etc.

Government publications Government of Canada Publications. 1 Mar. 2004. 8 Mar. 2004. http://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/home.html
Site of the official publisher of the Government of Canada.

Catalog of U.S. Government Publications. 27 Sep. 2003. GPO Access. 8 Mar. 2004. http://catalog.gpo.gov/F?RN=691099812
A search and retrieval service that provides bibliographic records of U.S. Government information products. Contains authoritative bibliographic records generated since January 1994 and is updated daily.

Foreign Government Resources on the Web. 17 Feb. 2003. University of Michigan Documents Center. 8 Mar. 2004.
http://www.lib.umich.edu/browse/International%20Government%20Information

Government Information. 12 Jan. 2004. National Library of Canada. 8 Mar. 2004. http://web.archive.org/web/19970705061813/http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/cangov/egovinfo.htm
A selective collection of links to Canadian government sites and key federal documents maintained by the National Library of Canada.
http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/politics-government/index-e.html 

Manitoba Government Publications Monthly Checklist. 8 Mar. 2004 http://www.gov.mb.ca/chc/leg-lib/checklist.html
Lists. 6 most recent checklists.

Provincial Publications. 2004. Federal Publications Inc. 8 Mar. 2004. http://www.fedpubs.com/province.htm
Provides addresses, telephone numbers and website links for each provincial outlet.

The Weekly Checklist. 1 Mar. 2004. Government of Canada Communications. 8 Mar. 2004. http://dsp-psd.pwgsc.gc.ca/Checklist/lists-e.html
Includes a listing of book and serial titles which have been released during the week by the Parliament of Canada, federal departments, and Statistics Canada.

Non-English Booklist
Choice
Foreign Language Book Sources 8 Mar. 2004 http://www.trussel.com/books/foreign.htm

Foreign Language Bookstores & Publishers Worldwide. 24 Feb. 2004. E. L. Easton. 8 Mar. 2004. http://eleaston.com/books/

International Publishers and Vendors. Auburn University Libraries. 8 Mar. 2004. http://www.lib.auburn.edu/acq/docs/forlang.html

Non-English Booksellers. The Bookwire Index. 2001. 8 Mar. 2004. http://web.archive.org/web/20080317170325/http://www.bookwire.com/bookwire/booksellers/Non-English-Booksellers.html

Publishers’ Catalogues. 8 Mar. 2004. http://web.archive.org/web/20070611144620/www.lights.ca/publisher/db/country/

“Regional Publishers”. 8 Dec. 2001. The AcqWeb Directory. http://acqweb.org/pubr/reg.html

Renaud-Bray. 8 Mar. 2004. http://www.renaud-bray.com/home.aspx?page=1
Website of a major French Canadian bookstore chain.

World Literature Today.
Available at WPL. Sample articles available at http://www.ou.edu/worldlit/

Serials Association for Library Collections & Technical Services Serials Section Education Committee. Unraveling the Mysteries of Serials. 1996. 8 Mar. 2004. http://web.archive.org/web/20040630000856/http://www.ala.org/ala/alctscontent/alctspubsbucket/webpublications/alctsserials/unravelingthemys/unravelingmysteries.htm

Gale Directory of Publications and Broadcast Media : An Annual Guide to Publications and Broadcast Stations. Detroit: Gale Research. Ref Z 6497 .G25

Koepf, Corrine. “Serials Publications.” 17 Apr. 2001. University of Buffalo. School of Informatics. 8 Mar. 2004.
http://web.archive.org/web/20071227110056/http://www.informatics.buffalo.edu/faculty/ellison/Syllabi/519Complete/formats/serials/serials.html

PubList. 8 Mar. 2004. http://www.publist.com
A searchable database containing over 150,000 domestic and international print and electronic publications including magazines, journals, e-journals, newspapers, and monographs. Includes information on titles, formats, publisher addresses, editor contacts, circulation data, and ISSN numbers.

Q Tech Web Acquisitions Resources: Serials Tools. 8 Mar. 2004.
http://www.family-source.com/cache/609967/idx/0

Vendors: Wholesalers

If one is to buy books effectively, there is no substitute for
a good working knowledge of the economics of wholesaling.

Daniel Melcher,
Melcher on Acquisitions

Few purchasers of books for libraries would question the fact that doing the bulk of one’s ordering from a wholesaler or wholesalers is, for the most part, a wise policy. Faced with some publishers’ reluctance or even outright refusal to sell their books directly to libraries, along with their poor service to and discriminatory pricing/discounting practices for their library customers, the acquisitions librarian is, in many instances, virtually forced to use the services of wholesalers. And it is certainly true that combining orders for many separate titles of disparate publishing houses can be both cost and time efficient; it is a lot easier to handle one shipment of 200 books with a single invoice than to cope with 200 books in, say, 20 shipments, each with its own invoice – and postage and shipping costs that will certainly surpass that for one shipment. It is also easier to monitor the performance of one or two or even a dozen wholesalers than hundreds or even thousands of individual publishers.

Many wholesalers offer services to their library customers that publishers are unable or unwilling to provide. These include free or inexpensive catalog cards (although with the advent of online catalogs this is less of a selling point than in the past); fully processed books or book-processing kits; approval, standing-order, and book-leasing plans; access to timely (usually updated weekly) microfiche or online information on activities in the book world that may influence a librarian’s purchasing decisions; access to in-print book information that is often more up-to-date and thus more useful than that found in the print or online version of Books in Print; and finally (and increasingly), online access to wholesalers’ databases, including the most important information for the acquisitions librarian, warehouse inventory, about which more will be said later in this chapter.

It would seem, then, that ordering books from wholesalers is not only a good idea, but also the answer to the acquisition librarian’s prayers. But it isn’t that simple, of course. A great deal of care must be taken in the selection of these vendors, and equal effort must be spent in monitoring all aspects of their service performance as long as they remain vendors of choice; if the library’s standards are not maintained, then the only choice is to “de-select” the poor performer and start all over with someone else. Like any other business, book wholesaling has its pros and cons, which arise from the radically changed and changing nature of the wholesaling business itself and also from the volatile nature of the publishing industry. There is intense competition among wholesalers for library dollars, and some indulge in sleazy practices to get library customers and to increase their profit margins in this dog-eat-dog business.

Choosing wholesalers
There are two broad categories of book wholesalers from which the librarian can choose. First there are full-line wholesalers, which stock a broad variety of titles from a large number of publishers: trade books, paperbacks, juvenile books, art books, small-press titles, remainder university-press titles, technical and professional books, audio books and so on. These wholesalers usually maintain good sized inventories of new titles as well as those backlist titles that are important to their library customers.

A major wholesaler such as Ingram Books or Baker & Taylor will stock 70,000 or more titles in their several distribution centers and if a title is not in stock, will be happy to order the book for the library customer if it is still available. Theoretically, it is possible for a library book purchaser to obtain the vast majority of titles needed from just one such wholesaler. In practice, however, this may not be such a good idea, for reasons discussed later in this chapter.

The second type of wholesaler is the specialized wholesaler, which stocks titles only within a certain category or categories. An example of this is Book Wholesalers Inc., which stocks only children’s books; another is Quality Books, which warehouses small-press titles almost exclusively. This is not to say that most specialized wholesalers will turn away an order for a book that does not fall within their specialties, but only that they stock special categories of books. All but a few specialized wholesalers will order just about anything their customers want, just as full-line wholesalers will.

Whatever the type of wholesaler they choose, librarians generally should expect the following:

• a large inventory of titles in stock
• prompt order fulfillment
• accurate order fulfillment
• accurate order-status reporting
• reasonable and competitive discounts
• strict adherence to each library’s policies regarding invoicing, cancellation of titles, returns, claims and exchanges, backordering, batching of shipments, and the like
• services such as online ordering, catalog cards, processed books or processing kits, approval or standing-order plans

Large title inventory
The primary reason a librarian uses wholesalers is precisely for their inventory. If the librarian is, so to speak, going to put all or most of the library’s eggs (dollars) in one basket, then the basket had better be a good-sized one. Ideally, any wholesaler should maintain an inventory that includes a substantial percentage of those titles that fall within its purview. Grandiose claims to the contrary, even the largest wholesalers cannot possibly stock all titles published within most categories, given the fact that more than 60,000 new titles are published each year and that approximately 1.9 million titles are in print in any given year. In actuality, according to the Book Industry Study Group, only about 20 percent of current in-print titles account for 80 percent of most wholesalers’ sales volume, so a stock of the proper 20 percent – one that will best meet the needs of its library customers – is what makes a wholesaler good enough to stay in business.

Two caveats are in order here, though. First, the librarian must be very leery of any wholesale book dealer who claims to provide “any book in print,” or “any book published in the United States,” or even, as one vendor claims to be able to do, to obtain “any book published in the English language”. Such claims are arrogant nonsense; no wholesaler can do this simply because some publishers, such as most encyclopedia publishers and publishers of certain major reference works, don’t allow their books to be distributed by wholesalers. It is far more important for the wholesaler to be honest enough to let the library customer know which publishers’ products it can or cannot supply so that the customer is not continually wasting time and money sending orders to the wholesaler only to have them unfilled. Certain of the larger wholesalers will, on request, supply the library with regularly updated lists of the publishers whose wares they cannot supply; this saves everyone, vendor included, much time and money. Respectable wholesalers are happy to provide such information; shysters are not.

Second caveat: be sure that the prospective wholesaler actually does have some book inventory on hand; certain wholesalers practice a quaint practice called drop shipping. The wholesaler who drops ships takes a library’s order and transmits it to the appropriate publisher or publishers. The publisher in turn fills the orders and ships the books to the library – but bills the wholesaler, who then bills the library. Note that drop shippers do not warehouse any books.

This is an absurd practice at best. Why pay someone to do practically nothing, or at least nothing more than add to the time it takes to receive the books? Any wholesaler who drop ships should be avoided like the plague. (It should be noted that Literary Market Place is a useful tool for determining who the few book drop shippers are; it lists most wholesalers, their specialties, the number of books and titles they stock, and whether they drop ship.)

Prompt order fulfillment
When dealing with a reputable wholesaler who maintains an adequate inventory, librarians can reasonably expect receipt of an initial shipment of 75 to 80 percent of the materials ordered within two weeks. Anything lower than this fulfillment percentage is, as a rule, unacceptable and should not be tolerated. On certain occasions, however, a library may send a special order for books that are not likely to be stocked regularly by the wholesaler, perhaps to create a special collection or to give greater depth to an area of the collection; in a case like this, it may be understandable for the vendor to take longer to fill the order, but this should be the exception, not the rule.

A few really good wholesalers guarantee shipment of most or all of a library’s order within forty-eight hours of receipt, and more often than not achieve that goal; for the rest, two weeks is more realistic. Then the vendor has time to obtain the unfulfilled balance of the order – the books not in stock or the more esoteric titles – within the library’s stipulated ship or cancel period, usually ninety days. Consistently failing to meet this standard, however, should mean that the vendor be dropped, because such performance is inexcusable and serves only to alienate frustrated library patrons who can’t understand why a book ordered two or three months ago is still not on the shelf.

Accurate order fulfillment
Just as librarians have a right to expect promptness in order fulfillment, they have the right to expect accuracy. There is no reason why a wholesaler should constantly err on titles or editions shipped, particularly when ISBNs are given, or in number of copies shipped. Returns, claims, and debit/credit procedures are a very costly part of the acquisitions process for both libraries and vendors, because they require a lot of staff time. Any vendor whose fulfillment error rate exceeds 1 or 2 percent should not be in business; any library book purchaser who accepts each shoddy performance should be doing something else. Certainly errors will and do occur, but again, they should be the rare exception to the rule. Careful monitoring of vendor performance is the only way for the acquisitions librarian to determine which vendors take the library’s business seriously enough to fill orders accurately as well as promptly.

Accurate order-status reporting
A few years ago at an ALA conference, a very large wholesaler was exhibiting its wares and touting its long tradition of excellent service to libraries. At a meeting nearby on vendor/library relations, an author of several children’s books was speaking; she complained that one of her books was being reported as out of print by that same wholesaler. Not only was the book still in print, however, but copies of it were also displayed at her publisher’s booth only a few dozen feet away from the wholesaler’s display.

To say that the audience was incensed was an understatement, and rightfully so. This incident confirmed what a lot of astute librarians have long suspected: that status reports from some wholesalers do not reflect reality but what wholesalers would like librarians to believe is the reality. Accurate status reporting is essential so that the acquisitions librarian can decide whether to reorder the book from another wholesaler or directly from the publisher. Since reordering is both costly and time consuming, the decision is not made lightly. And it is extremely frustrating to be unable to obtain needed items for the library’s collection, but when this happens not because such items are truly unavailable but because a vendor is either careless enough or venal enough to mislead its customers, then it is intolerable.

Two decades ago I wrote an article on the pros and cons of dealing with wholesalers. In preparation for writing it, I asked the staff to carefully monitor the wholesalers’ status reports submitted to our system. It turned out to be a time-consuming but very revealing process. The results were as follows:

• For books reported as out of print (OP), wholesalers’ reports were accurate approximately 60 percent of the time.
• For books reported as out of stock (OS) with the publisher, wholesalers’ reports were accurate less than 20 percent of the time.

In other words, fewer than half of the status reports received from some of the major wholesalers with whom we were then doing business were accurate; one of these vendors was at that time the largest book wholesaler in the United States.

Why do vendors report so poorly on book status? They say it is because the information they receive from publishers is inaccurate. But my study based its validity on calling publishers directly to confirm the status data reported to us by wholesalers, and publishers indicated that the wholesalers’ reports were rarely valid. It follows, then, that either certain wholesalers are incredibly careless in their reporting, or that some wholesalers deliberately misreport in order to increase profit by selling only what is in their warehouse (I use the present tense here because the problem still exists, although some not all – of the worst offenders have gone out of business).

It takes both time and money to fill nonstick orders. When a library orders a book that the vendor does not have on hand, the vendor must go through all the same steps of ordering, processing, shipping, and billing that the acquisitions librarian goes through acquiring a book. It takes a lot less time (and money) to simply report that the book is OP or OSI, or simply that the vendor cannot supply the title and cancel the library’s order – with the near certainty that most librarians will accept this report in good faith and spend the money on something that the wholesaler does have in stock. The wise library purchaser will monitor wholesaler status reports as carefully and consistently as all other aspects of vendor performance. There is no excuse for continuing poor performance in this area, and vendors who persist in this less-than-savory process should be dropped.

Reasonable and competitive discounts
This is and should be one of the areas of greatest concern to astute librarians, because the discount is something that can be easily manipulated and abused, especially for the more naïve members of the library profession. We have already seen that publishers’ discount policies in dealing with libraries can be capricious and arbitrary, ranging from the eminently fair and reasonable to the downright discriminatory and totally absurd. The same is true for wholesalers, except that their actions are not always so obvious.

The wisdom of Daniel Melcher’s statement at the beginning of this chapter becomes clear when one carefully examines the various discount structures employed by wholesalers and begins to ask the right questions. The answers to those questions can affect a library’s purchasing power in a very positive way by ensuring that the library is not paying more than necessary for its books:

• What is a reasonable discount?
• What is discriminatory discounting?
• What kind of discounts am I receiving, and how do they compare with those given to other libraries with similar book budgets and buying patterns?

In Melcher on Acquisition, Daniel Melcher states that effective book buying depends on a good working knowledge of the economics of wholesaling – not what wholesalers would like you to believe about wholesaling economics, but what the facts are. And those facts are simple: book wholesaling is a business with a rather low profit margin or return on investment (estimated at an average of 3 to 5 percent; food supermarket profits are about the only others that are lower, at only about 1 percent). Because the profit margin is low, wholesalers must, like other businesses, sell a lot of books that were sold to them on a high discount basis, enough to ensure maximum profit from sheer volume, or sell fewer lower-discount books. Those who ignore these simple facts do so at their peril; the demise during the 1970s and early 1980s of a dozen major book wholesaling companies – Campbell & Hall, Ancorp, Richard Abel, Charles Clark, Imperial Books, Huntting, and Dimondstein, among others – revealed to librarians just how difficult the business is. And although the market today is dominated by Ingram Books, Baker & Taylor, Blackwell, and a few midsized, specialized, and small firms, even they have had rough times over the last few decades. (A selective list of currently operating wholesalers appears in Appendix A at the end of this book.)

Why is the profit margin in book wholesaling so slim? The answer lies in the rigid discount schedule that publishers give their wholesaler customers, which defines (in most cases) what the wholesaler can charge their customers. A look at a typical trade-book discount schedule (see Table 8.1) gives some idea of what wholesalers pay for books.

Discounts to wholesalers

Number of copies*	Discount from publisher
1 copy	10-20%
2-4 copies	24-33 1/3%
5-24 copies	40%
25-99 copies	41%
100-249 copies	42%
250-499 copies	43%
500-999 copies	44%
1,000 copies**	46%

* Do not have to be all one title; can be assorted.
** On occasion, the discount for more than 1,000 copies can rise as high as 56 percent, but 46 percent is the norm.
Source: ABA Bookbuyers Handbook (1997)

Since the bulk of a wholesaler’s book orders for trade-book purchases fall into the 40-46 percent discount range, the smart wholesaler will try to accumulate orders for any given publisher to attain the maximum discount possible.

But the real problem for the wholesaler is this: if a wholesaler wants library business, the company must compete with discounts that the books’ producers – publishers – give to libraries that buy direct from them. In most cases, these publisher discounts are lower, usually 10 to 25 percent for their library customers, but some will be 40 percent or higher – mainly for larger libraries with high-volume purchase. If every book the wholesaler buys is discounted by the publisher at ?? percent, this leaves the wholesaler only a 6 percent margin. Out of that 6 percent come all the customary business expenses that must be met before a profit is earned, such as buildings, salaries, heat, light, telephone, and freight. Clearly, wholesalers must do everything possible to minimize cost and maximize profit in order to stay in business.

There are a number of ways to do this, some of which are proper and others which smack impropriety. Cutting costs is the most obvious, and this certainly has been successful for some vendors. However, cost cutting often is at the expense of service to library customers in the previous example of reporting books not in the warehouse OP or OSI.Reducing warehouse inventory is another way to reduce costs, again service suffers when the library does not receive books on a timely basis because the wholesaler has to order them from the publisher. Decreasing their discounts to libraries may also reduce wholesalers’ costs, but it also may alienate library customers and ultimately result in the loss of valuable business. Imposing exorbitant “shipment and handling” charges may bring in some wonderful pure profit: a wholesaler sold the library where I worked six videocassettes at $7.00 each, and charged the library $45.00 each for postage and handling, a total of $270.00 over and above the $450.00 cost of the material (that was some handling).

It should be noted that wholesalers are not alone in using this process. In 1987, the R. R. Bowker Company announced that henceforward a flat 5 percent of the invoice total would be charged for “shipping and handling”; this meant that on a $10,000 order for the Bowker reference books, a library would pay $500 in shipping costs – even though the actual cost of shipping the books by common carrier was only almost $140. Even worse, however, was the fact that the customer who chose to buy the reference materials in CD-ROM format would pay the same amount for shipping and handling – even though the actual cost of shipping a few compact discs by first-class mail or UPS amount to less than $20 – leaving Bowker with a pure profit on just this invoice of $480. Needless to say, library customers were irate, and after some months of pressure, Bowker rescinded this absurd policy.

While all these cost-cutting, profit-increasing tactics are somewhat questionable, at least they are very straightforward. But wholesalers have found a number of other ways to increase profits by playing not-so-straightforward games with discounts. The most common of these are

1. inflating book prices or reporting phony discounts from publishers
2. overcharging for certain bindings
3. offering outlandishly high discounts to libraries that require bids for their business
4. establishing “across-the-board” discount structures.

Each can be illustrated very simply and each is an actual incident that occurred.

Inflating prices
Not long ago a library ordered several copies of a paperback title from a major wholesaler. The books were back ordered and eventually arrived with the invoice. The library had planned to pay $6.95 for each of the books. The wholesaler charged $8.95 each, however, - even though the printed cover price was still $6.95. The discount given on the wholesaler’s invoice was 10 percent, and the code indicated the reason for this was that this was a short discount title from the publisher. However, someone at the wholesaler’s warehouse had inadvertently left the invoice that was sent to the wholesaler in one of the books. It showed that the net p rice of the books was $6.95 each, and the publisher’s discount to the wholesaler was a whopping 52 percent – not exactly a “short” discount. Another wholesaler of art books offered the library a flat 10 percent discount on his titles, since he got “only 20 percent” from the books’ publishers. The library’s business relationship with him came to a rather abrupt halt when an astute staff member discovered a copy of one of his publisher invoices at the bottom of a carton; the document indicated that he was receiving a 56 percent discount on each and every book ordered. Understandably, his company went out of business once the word got around to a few of his bigger customers. And in case anyone doubts that this kind of thing still goes on, Publishers Weekly reported in its February 10, 1997 (p. 17) issue that a small publisher had “been trying for more than two years to learn why books he sold to B&T at a trade discount were being sold to stores and libraries at only a 5% short discount.” Apparently he never did find out.

Binding overcharges
Overcharging for certain bindings is a scam practiced frequently by wholesalers who sell children’s books. Hardcover children’s books usually have one of three kinds of binding: a nearly indestructible sewn library binding, which is usually discounted to wholesalers at 25 percent because of the added cost to produce this type of binding; a reinforced binding, which is not as sturdy as library binding but stronger than the third type of binding; and the same trade binding used for most adult trade hardcover books. Both reinforced and trade bindings are sold to wholesalers at the standard trade discount of up to 40 percent, depending on the volume. The rub comes when some wholesalers arbitrarily decide to classify reinforced bindings (sometimes called single bindings) as library bindings, and thus are in a position to extend short discounts to their library customers. As a result, the library discount on the reinforced bindings usually end up between 6 and 9 percent, the same discount received on a true library binding, which of course means that the wholesaler’s profit has jumped from a range of 12 to 19 percent to one more than three times that much. The small librarian will not buy reinforced bindings from wholesalers who perform this stunt, but will go to another wholesaler who doesn’t or go directly to the publisher and get the publisher’s full trade discount – which even if it is only 20 percent for libraries, is better than what the wholesaler is offering.

Discounts on bids
Some unfortunate librarians are required by law to obtain bids on their business. Still others get bids because they think they will receive better discounts as a result; these latter librarians are not so more unfortunate as hopelessly naïve, for this is where the less-than-home wholesaler can indulge in hanky-panky of the first order. Keeping in mind the usual maximum trade discount the wholesaler receives, what should the librarian think of the wholesaler’s representative who prefers a 44, 45 or 46 percent discount on trade books in exchange of all the library’s business? What we should think is that this person either is a fool, a knave, or a liar. And the librarian who believes this kind of pie-in-the-sky promise is just as foolish as the sales pitcher in the first place, since most librarians buy a lot of trade books, are we to believe that a wholesaler is going to give up all of nearly all of the profit from trade-book sales? And since librarians also buy a lot of nontrade books, many of which carry smaller publisher discounts trade books, what is the wholesaler going to do about those profits and discounts? What will prevent the wholesaler from simply supplying these books on which a greater profit is to be made, reporting less profitable titles as OP or OSI, and letting orders for those titles sit in a file until the library’s cancellation date is reached?Simply put, getting bids is unwise, to say the least, whether or not one has to do it. If you must ask for bids, however, get an agreement in writing that spells out all discount terms, minimally acceptable levels of order fulfillment, and specific types of books that the wholesaler cannot or will not supply. Then monitor that contract with extreme care; if you don’t, you’ll end up paying more than you should for too many books, seeing holes develop in the collection where books ordered are not being provided, or both.

Across-the-board discounts
At one time or another, just about every wholesaler tries to convince its customers that they’ll be a lot better off if they accept a “generous” blanket discount on all materials purchased than if they got one discount for trade books, another on paperbacks, still another for short-discount titles, and so on. What usually happens with this “generic” discount, however, is that the wholesaler makes out big – with the library paying to make it possible. To illustrate, I received a letter from a large wholesaler (and usually a good one) stating that henceforth all books sold by them to libraries would be discounted at a flat 15 percent rate. What did this mean to us? Simply that buying books from that vendor had just become prohibitive. Here’s why: As a major public library system, the library for which I was working spent more than half of its $6 million book budget on trade and paperback books, all of which were discounted at an average of approximately 36 to 37 percent (since much of this business was done directly with publishers, some of whom offered smaller discounts to their library customers). Only about 20 percent of the budget was spent on limited discount books, those discounted from 15 percent down to no discount at all. In other words, with the wholesaler’s new flat 15 percent discount, the library would be losing up to 22 percent of the discount it had been receiving on 50 percent of the books purchased, and in return would gain 5 to 15 percent on 20 percent of the total books purchased. Even P. T. Barnum would be hard-pressed to find a sucker foolish enough to swallow that one.

Strict adherence to library policies
Libraries, like most other institutions, operate in certain ways and within certain parameters that are defined by policy that may be as formal as a written statement or as informal as a set of procedures that everyone understands and accepts. Whether the policy is formal or informal, however, the vendor who does business with the library is expected to follow these “rules of the game” at all times. It behooves the acquisitions librarian to put these policies in writing and to make them available to anyone who wishes to do business with the library, and to monitor how well each vendor does in meeting a library’s requirements.

Vendors, both publishers and wholesalers, frequently complain about the diversity among libraries’ requirements. Library A wants a part invoice arranged by ISBN, Library B wants a three-part bill with titles listed in alphabetical order; Library C wants unfilled orders cancelled in ninety days, but Library D will settle for 120 days; Library E requires that vendors ship all materials by UPS, while Library F specifies that the vendor must use the USPS’s library rate; and so it goes on. It may be true that there is little uniformity as far as library protocol go, but there are often good reasons why such diversity exists. Different governing bodies and agencies at various levels impose certain requirements on libraries, for example, and laws governing purchase vary from locality to locality. A wise vendor accepts this diversity and follows whatever reasonable structures the library mandates.

Other services
Some of the greatest advantages in dealing with wholesalers are extra services many offer to their library customers. For small and large libraries alike, such items as catalog cards and nominally processing kits or fully processed books can free staff of other duties and thus become a serious budget consideration. Larger libraries often use services such as gathering plans: lease plans, standing order plans, approval plans, and blanket-order plans. Except for lease plans, which are used primarily by public libraries, the other gathering plans are most useful in university or research libraries and in some special libraries. (Further discussion of the pros and cons of gathering plans follows in Chapter 10.)

A ray of light
While there are a lot of good reasons for library book purchasers to buy many or even most of their books from wholesalers, these vendors must be carefully chosen, constantly monitored, and dropped when and if it becomes necessary. For some reason, librarians loath to discuss the companies that provide them with books, but a discussion of their strengths and weaknesses is the only way to get rid of the rascals and keep the good folks in business.Earlier in the chapter I mentioned an article I wrote on the pros and cons of dealing with wholesalers. The article was preceded by a survey of 320 libraries of all types and sizes on major aspects of their dealings with wholesalers: discounts, order fulfillment, accuracy, and others. The results of the survey indicated an almost unbelievable discrepancy among libraries as to discounts given. For example, one library with a book budget of nearly $1 million received a 38 percent discount on trade hardcovers from one of the largest wholesalers, while a nearby library with a budget of $12,000 received a 41 percent discount.

A very small library in the South was given a 13 percent discount on library editions, while a major school system in the Cleveland, Ohio, area got only a 7.5 percent discount on those same books. With few exceptions, none of the 320 respondents were satisfied with their discounts or felt that they were fair or reasonable, and both those feelings and this sort of imbalance remains today. Nonetheless, most who responded indicated that they would continue to buy from wholesalers and felt there was a real need for this service.

The fact remains, however, that we are doing neither good wholesalers nor our library colleagues a favor by continuing to give library dollars to those companies not deserving of our support. They are the wholesalers who will do anything to get our business; who swear they can supply any book in print the day after tomorrow at less cost than any of the competition. They are the wholesalers whose representatives seem to believe that they deserve our business if they take us to expensive lunches or dinners often enough. They are also the wholesalers who overcharge us, misrepresent their inventories, and fill only those orders that make them the greatest profit. In short, they are the snake-oil salespeople of the book industry and should be avoided like the plague by those who purchase books for libraries, especially when it involves using taxpayers’ money to pay for them, as it usually does.

Good wholesalers do not play games with their library customers based on inflated discount promises; they do not give Library A one discount and Library B another when both libraries’ purchasing patterns and volumes are similar. They may never take you to lunch, but let their good service be their sales pitch. (And is there a librarian out there who really believes that all those “free” lunches aren’t paid for by the rest of us?)

Good wholesalers clearly state their discount structure in their ads for all to see. They give librarians access to their inventory through regular (usually weekly) warehouse-inventory status reports on microfiche, disc, or online. They fill each and every order that is possible to fill. In short, they conduct business with their customers professionally – which is the only way we should accept. The ray of light is that there are a lot of those professionals out there; we just have to find them and support their efforts as best we can.

Vendors and publishing

The more you know about the economics of those you

buy from, the more effectively you can deal with them.

Daniel Melcher,
Melcher on Acquisition 

On the face of it, the librarian has only three choices when it comes to choosing vendors to supply books: Books can be purchased directly from their producer, the publisher; from the wholesalers whose function it is to buy books from publishers and resell them to libraries and retail booksellers; or from retail booksellers themselves, either from stores or from a number of retailers who sell their wares via the Internet. The decision as to which vendor or vendors to use is not a simple one, however.

There are literally thousands of publishers in the United States, dozens of wholesalers, and countless retail booksellers in nearly every city and town; most of these purveyors of books are anxious to sell them to libraries. Each entity has its own policies for dealing with the library market, and each has certain strengths and weaknesses. Knowledge of these elements is the best way to guarantee what every library book-buyer seeks: the best possible service at the best possible price.

But how does one gain this necessary knowledge? Trial and error is hardly the answer; it simply doesn’t work because of the large number of variables involved. As a result, the librarian who is not aware of these variables and how to use them to greatest advantage will find the process of choosing a vendor an exercise in frustration – not only for the librarian, but ultimately for the library’s patrons, who get peeved when the books they s eek either do not appear on the shelves at all, or eventually appear only months after interest in them has peaked. Lack of knowledge can also be very costly; some vendors may take advantage of the unprepared librarian’s naiveté and resort to less than ethical tactics once they have the library’s business, perhaps inflating prices arbitrarily, playing with discounts, or the like. Simply accepting vendors’ claims concerning discount and order fulfillment as the final and ultimate truth isn’t very smart either. Any vendor representative with minimal corporate intelligence will promise every one of his or her prospective customers the sun, the moon, and the stars – all at the highest discounts in the business. The problem is that this just isn’t going to happen, no matter how good the vendor is.

The only way to make wise decisions regarding book suppliers is to find out all you can about each type of vendor and then ask two basic questions of others who have had experience with a number of vendors: first, which ones they use and why; and second, which ones should be avoided and why. The first step mentioned above is the easy one; you can begin by asking specific questions of the publishers’ or wholesalers’ representatives, or by writing or calling someone at the company. Keep in mind, however, that when you do this, you’ll be highly unlikely to hear much about the negative side of the vendors’ services. An even better tactic is to make a few phone calls to large library systems, which will usually get you somewhat more objective information. Meetings and conferences are also fertile sources of information. Talk to your colleagues and find out who is really fair, honest, and efficient, and who isn’t. A small investment of time and effort can give the astute acquisitions librarian a re al edge in what is too often a cutthroat business.

Publishers as vendors 

With a few exceptions, it is possible to purchase just about any book in print from its publisher, and there are often good reasons for going directly to the source. In the first place, if the book is still in print, the publisher is more likely than anyone else to have copies available for sale. At the same time, if the book is unavailable for whatever reason, the publisher will report this, often more accurately than wholesalers do.

Some of the order-status information that is routinely given by reputable publishers in their status reports includes:

• OP. This title is out of print. There is no point in trying to order it from this publisher or from a wholesaler.
• OS. The title is out of stock at this time but will sooner or later be reprinted. If a reprint date is set, the publisher will report that date also.
• OSI. The title is out of stock indefinitely. This simply means that the publisher isn’t willing to let the title go out of print yet, but hasn’t decided to reprint it either.
• NYP. The title is not yet published but is scheduled for publication. If there is a firm publication date, this will be reported here.
• NOP. Not our publication. For some reason the order was sent to the wrong publisher. Do a little verification and send it to the correct publisher.

With most publishers, you will get most of what you order; however, items not shipped will be those reported using one of the above codes. (There are a few other codes, but they are rarely used and need no consideration here.)

Items that are not shipped (except OP titles) are usually back ordered; that is, the order is held open by the publisher until the books become available or until the end of the period of time that the library has stipulated as its limited cancellation period. The stipulated back-order period can be any length the librarian wishes, but ninety days seems to be the most common and the most workable. It does not tie up the library’s funds invunninably, yet it gives the publisher a reasonable chance to reprint out to reach publication date within the specified period. If back-ordered titles are not available for shipment within the time frame, they are reported as cancelled to the ordering library, which then has the choice of reordering the same book or spending its money on another title.

So far, so good. The library orders; then the publisher ships materials available and reports accurately on unavailable materials. Those publishers (or their order fulfillment agencies) who are good at it fill orders fast and accurately report promptly, supply accurate invoices, ship in containers strong enough to protect their contents from damage, use reputable and most-efficient shipping companies, give the library a reasonable credit for them (usually few or none) as simple and efficient as possible. It then becomes obvious to the library book purchaser which publishers are not responsible, and obtaining those publishers’ products from a wholesaler instead is the best way of circumventing some publishers’ sloppy and inefficient distribution practices.

Ordering from the publisher can be especially valuable to librarians who want some or all of the books in a hurry, but again, this all depends on how good the publisher’s distribution system is. Most publishers can’t hold a carpel to certain of the big wholesalers, whose online ordering capacity almost guarantees delivery of materials in stock, in their warehouses within a day or two. The catch, of course, is the in stock part; if the book is not in the wholesaler’s warehouse at the time a library orders it, the wholesaler first has to order it and then fill the library’s order, thereby adding some delay to the fulfillment process. For this reason, many public librarians who like to have “hot” titles such as probable best-sellers or books on timely topics on the shelves as quickly as they are available in bookstores see ordering directly from the publisher as a real benefit, since it is a recognized fact that the bigger the book, in the case of best-sellers, the quicker the reading public wants it. Once interest peaks, however – usually within a month or two of its hardcover publication, but always once the paperback becomes available – demand diminishes. There is nothing quite so dead as a Danielle Steel or Tom Clancy novel in hardcover a year after its publication date.

Some librarians do not buy best-sellers but still require timely receipt of certain materials, such as reference books that are published on a regular, usually annual, basis. Suppose one orders a set of print encyclopedias at a cost of say, $1,200. Prorating that over a year, the library is paying $100 each month for the set. If the sets are shipped four months into the year, however, those same books cost the library $150 per month. Similarly, each month the library doesn’t have the 2000 edition that it has ordered of Metals Handbook finds the value of the book reduced as well as its cost increased. The only ways to ensure timely receipt are to send orders directly to the publisher or to place such orders on a standing-order basis. In fact, it is necessary to do so for some materials; most encyclopedia publishers, for example, do not sell their wares to wholesalers for resale, and many reference-book publishers follow the same practice.

Whether it’s a sure best-seller, a reference book, or a book that is likely to be in high demand for other reasons, it is wise to order the title six to eight weeks in advance of publication date. Many library systems, for example, order large quantities of a best-selling author’s forthcoming title within this time frame because few publishing houses pay any attention to their announced publication dates; instead they ship books as soon as they are available from the printer – possibly weeks before the announced dates. As a result, these libraries have the books in-house as fast as the bookstores do; by giving this kind of book priority in cataloguing and processing, it can be on the shelves and ready for patrons within a day or so of their receipt. This keeps both patrons and branch librarians happy, and it also gladdens the hearts of technical services staff when they no longer hear the eternal cry, “Where are our books?”

There is also a special reason for ordering reference books in advance of publication date. Most reference publishers print only a certain number of copies, based on the previous year’s sales. There is little point in their printing enough copies “in case” there is greater demand – since experience has shown that demand remains fairly constant – or for purpose of backlist, since no one wants a warehouse full of backlist titles once the next years’ editions have rendered them obsolete. In short, late ordering of this type of materials is likely to leave the library with no copies at all; the supply is used up and that’s that. Just a little forethought can avoid this unpleasant scenario and maintain valuable materials in the library’s collection.

There are some disadvantages to ordering directly from the publisher, however. Any librarian who orders a variety of books in substantial numbers recognizing that dealing direct means a multitude of shipments, an increase of shipping costs (almost nearly always paid by the library), and many invoices to be processed and checks for payment issued. This adds up to an increase in both the possibility of error and a large investment of staff time and effort – that is, money. Plus, there are just too many publishers for the library to deal with them all on a direct basis. Even thinking of sending orders directly to the publisher for all the books that even a small or medium-sized library may want boggles the mind; for larger libraries it amounts to sheer madness. In addition, each publisher has its own policy for distributing books to libraries and charging for them, so too many directs orders can make it nearly impossible to anticipate elements such as the actual price the library will pay for the book, how it will be shipped, how well or how poorly the shipper will pack the books, what the invoice will look like, or how easy or how difficult it will be to return a damaged or wrong book for credit. In other words, monitoring vendor performance is a difficult job to begin with; keeping track of hundreds of dealers and thousands of transactions is nearly impossible.

Finally, libraries almost always pay substantially more for books ordered from a publisher than they do if books are ordered from a good wholesaler. Publishers, by and large, have a singular double standard in their dealings with libraries vis-à-vis wholesalers and retail booksellers. This is reflected nowhere more vividly than in an annual volume published by the American Booksellers Association, The ABA Bookbuyers Handbook. This fact volume lists the discount policies of nearly every major publisher in the United States. I use the plural intentionally, because just about every publisher listed in the Handbook presents two sets of discount policies: one for wholesalers/retailers and one for libraries/institutions. Almost without exception, the discounts for the latter group are substantially lower and in many cases nonexistent. In fact, book prices charged to libraries average 20 percent more than what booksellers pay for exactly the same items. Why?

In the first place, publishers have traditionally viewed the library market as a rather unimportant one. They tend to think of library dollars as relatively insignificant; of libraries as being notoriously slow payers of their bills; of library business practices as highly and needlessly complex and out of date; of libraries purchasing only single copies of most books; of every sale to a library as an absolute guarantee that a reader somewhere will not buy a copy of the book if he or she can get a copy at the library “for nothing.” Finally, there is the publisher’s argument that libraries really only want to buy from the wholesalers anyway, and, given a choice, will inevitably do so; why then, cater to the library market?

Just how valid are these assertions? Not very. The “insignificance” of library dollars was indicated more than a decade ago when the Association of American Publishers, at its annual meeting in Rye, New York, called one segment of its program “Libraries: The Two Billion Dollar Market” (that year’s total annual book volume was $6 billion!). In the year 2000, the ratio remains close: nearly $8 billion for libraries out of about $26 billion annual volume, according to the Bowker Annual. And a hefty segment of those library billions includes a lot of books purchased that pretty much only libraries buy: first novels, poetry, overpriced reference sets, backlist and midlist titles, genre fiction hardcovers, hardcover juvenile books – the list goes on and on.

What about libraries being slow to pay their bills because of their “complex and archaic” business practices? To the former I answer that libraries are no worse than retailers and wholesalers in paying up, and probably a lot better. Publishers Weekly provides a great deal of page space, especially in its “Letters” section, to tales of booksellers having their credit cut off because of nonpayment of their bills, or of bookstores that have gone out of business for the same reason. Half-a-dozen major wholesalers have also gone belly up over the last three decades because their bills got so high that publishers cut off their credit. And what makes this particularly ironic is that both retailers and wholesalers are allowed to return any book unsold, for full credit, for up to a year after the book has sat on the shelves of the store or warehouse, yet they can’t keep up with their book bills? Anyone with minimal common sense might ask the publishing community how a publisher can ever know the state of his or her business when at any time he or she may be inundated with returns for which the buyer will receive face value. A librarian might venture to say that the publishing industry’s returns policy does not lend itself to good business practice, but after all, that’s how publishers started selling books in the eighteenth century. And libraries are archaic?

Indeed, it is also hard to conceive of a more complex and wasteful business practice than trying to maintain a dual accounting system, as publishers routinely do for booksellers on the one hand and libraries on the other. Consider that libraries do order a lot of single copies of books, but so do retail booksellers. (In fact, many libraries frequently order in multiples much larger than their retail counterparts, but that’s easy to forget.) Publishers denigrate library single-copy orders but bend over backwards to support booksellers’ single-copy orders with a process called STOP (Single Title Order Plan), by which booksellers, if they meet a few simple criteria, can get at least a 40 percent discount on each and every single-copy order. Libraries pay full price, with no discount for the same items and have never even had a STOP system offered to them. And, as any good independent bookseller will tell you, the individualized special ordering they do - almost always for a single copy of a book – is what keeps them in business, especially in the face of increasing competition from the chain bookstores. And then there’s that hoary old linker that holds that moment. Somehow if a library buys a book to calculate “free,” it means lower sales for publishers, since no reader will buy a book that is available for nothing. This bogus reasoning gives the publishing world another rationale for deprecating library sales even though it has about as much validity as leaving your molar under your pillow at night for the Tooth Fairy. The truth is that most library users are book people – people who need or want books enough to pay cash for them from time to time, even though the same book may be available to them in their nearby library. In addition, bookstore looms ons and sales seem to have no relation to the number of libraries in their immediate vicinity. And, interestingly enough, each year bookstore sales rise at a rate of about 10 percent – almost exactly as much as library budgets rise each year. If libraries are buying more books, according to prevailing publishing wisdom, then bookstores and bookstore sales ought to be diminishing, which is patently not the case, nor has it ever been.

If nothing else indicates that books will continue to sell no matter how many libraries expand or how many books they have in their collections, the contemporary phenomenon of the chain bookstore does. There is scarcely a community in the country big enough to have even a small shopping mall that does not have its own Borders or Barnes & Noble bookstore; the chains continue to proliferate at an incredible rate. The fact that all these “bookstored” communities have libraries certainly hasn’t stopped the growth of the chains and shows no indication in doing so, any more than libraries have ever had a harmful effect on bookstore sales. What the chains are facing in the new millennium, however, is a much more dangerous competitor than the local library, and it is the phenomenal growth of bookselling over the Internet by such companies as Amazon.com. Recognizing this real threat has caused some of the nation’s largest chains, Barnes & Noble for one, to set up their own Websites and aggressively market over the internet; where this will all end up is moot at this point, but it is already beginning to change the face of retail bookselling.

Finally, we have the argument that libraries traditionally buy books from wholesalers, not direct from publishers: there is a great deal of truth to this, but there is also good reasons for it. The first is that publishers, intentional or otherwise, have done just about everything they can – such as the discriminatory discounting – to send library dollars into the coffers of the wholesalers. If anyone doubts that these discriminatory practices occurred, hark back to the U.S. Senate hearings in the 1960s, which ended with a number of publishers settling up with libraries to the tune of $11 million to avoid prosecution for price fixing; it’s all there, in the public record. Given discriminatory pricing and discounting as well as active discouraging by some publishers of direct library business, is it any wonder that libraries have traditionally bought the bulk of their books from wholesalers?

One can only conclude that many American publishers would like to see direct library sales just fade away, to be serviced totally by the wholesalers. This is unlikely, however, given the state of that industry at the dawn of the millennium and the controversies generated by some wholesalers when they do get all of some libraries’ business. (A discussion of these and other problems in dealing with wholesalers follow in Chapter 8.) For good reason, libraries will continue to mix their sources for books and will continue to press for fairness in the pricing and discounting of those books to libraries. Is this likely to happen? It should be noted that many years ago the ALA Council, the ruling body of the American Library Association, passed a resolution that asked trade-book pulishers to examine their individual discount policies in light of their fairness (or lack thereof) to library customers. Although there has been no action on the resolution taken by publishers since then, readers of this book are strongly urged to continue to press for fairer policies. It is in the interest of every library to do so.

Buying from retailers
A final word is in order on the use of retail booksellers as a source for library books. There may be occasions when this makes perfectly good sense for the library purchaser – for instance, sudden insistent patron demand after an author appears on a major television talk show, or needing more copies immediately when requests for a very hot title gets out of hand. In many cases, local bookstores may specialize in books that are hard to locate or not easily available from traditional sources; examples may be a store that specializes in African American books or gay books. It may be easier and not much more costly to get materials from such a local source – plus the local source may be a gold mine of ideas for titles that could be used in the collection but aren’t reviewed in the usual journals.

In terms of good public relations for the library, these strategies may pay off, and so the extra cost of such books may be worth it, but there definitely is a cost factor. A books that the library can get from a wholesaler or even some publishers at a 30 to 40 percent discount will rarely be discounted more than 10 or 20 percent by the retailer (except, of course, for titles that appear on the New York Times bestseller list, which are usually discounted by 30 percent or more), and it is unfair to ask for more than that. The retailer certainly cannot sell books for what he/she pays for them or the store will not be in business for long, so a smaller discount is not unreasonable. At the same time, titles that are in high-demand in the library are often in high demand at retail stores; many retailers resist selling their stock of high-demand titles to libraries at a discount when they can sell to their regular customers at full price, and rightfully so. Add to that the fact that if the store sells too much of this inventory to libraries and doesn’t have books left to sell to retail customers, those customers may be lost forever.

The retail bookseller is a good source only for very special purchases or when time is of the essence. Occasional and careful use of this source can be valuable for the library book buyer, and the benefits may sometimes far outweigh the additional dollars spent, but the caveats above should be considered before using this source routinely.

Eaglen, Audrey. Buying Books. 2nd ed. New York: Neal Schuman Publishers, 2000. Z689 .E33 2000. Chapter 7: Vendors: Retailers and publishers.