Date: Fri, 03 Jun 2005 10:13:44 -0400
From: Helen Mack (Lehigh Univ.) <hpm0_at_lehigh.edu>
Subject: ACQNET: RE: How came you to Acquisitions?
As a little kid, I remember hanging out in the rare book room with
my father who was a library director. I put book pockets in the back
of my Golden Books and circulated them to myself, so I guess
librarianship was in my blood.
Much later, as a college dropout, I took a grunt job as a keypuncher
for a library's automated circulation system (this was in the late 1960s).
After I proved to the circulation folks that I had a brain, I was given
some higher level work, reviewing the various reports spewed out by the
mainframe that processed my keypunched book cards.
After a few years, I returned to college with the sole purpose of
attending library school. The school I selected gave credit for
substantial pre-professional experience, and I qualified for the
maximum reduction in the number of credits required. I thought the
library program was pretty worthless, because the faculty had been
teaching for so long that they no longer knew what it was like to
actually work in a library. For some reason I have always valued
hands-on work and practical experience over theory. Anyway, I used
my credits to give myself an increasingly lighter course load as I
progressed through the library program.
Like others who have responded to this query, I did not come into
acquisitions directly. There was no acquisitions training whatsoever
in my library school. I began my professional career as a science
cataloger. This was back in the dark ages before personal computers.
As automation crept into our lives, I evolved into the database
manager, overseeing the retrospective conversion of the card catalog.
Unfortunately, a cataloging backlog formed during this period. While
some of the retrocon work was done in-house, much of it was
contracted out. There were problems with this "out-house" part
of the process. We later tried contracting out the backlog, but
there were problems with that too (we are a Dewey library).
By this time I was head of cataloging. The head of tech services
urged the training of some cataloging clerks to be copy catalogers.
While that was a very important move because it eventually
eliminated the backlog, I also really lost interest in cataloging.
Without any easy stuff to work on, I felt less and less productive
and was pretty unhappy for a while.
I took an accounting course at the local community college and began
to consider changing careers. When lo and behold, the head of
acquisitions slot opened up! I jumped at the chance and got the job.
I have always loved shopping, so as someone else said in an earlier
response, getting to shop with someone else's money has been fabulous.
My staff is extremely competent and productive. They happily pass
to me the really complex stuff, the foreign stuff, and the out of
print stuff. And, within the last couple of years, I have expanded
my job to include the selling of unwanted books. The fun I find in
all of this more than compensates for the headaches and complications
of leasing ebooks and databases, so I expect to stick with this
until I retire.
Actually my strong cataloging background has served me well in
acquisitions. With our first ILS, acquisitions was not integrated
with the catalog, so the staff was pretty free to enter bib records
to fit requests that were difficult to verify. With the second (and
current) ILS, all the modules talk to each other. My cataloging
experience had enabled me to guide the staff in selecting appropriate
bib records to import from OCLC and to train them as a second tier
of copy catalogers.
While I have spent many years at this one institution, I have held
various positions, learning a lot along the way, and ending up with
something I truly love.
Helen P. Mack, Acquisitions Librarian
Lehigh University, Fairchild Library
8A E. Packer Ave.
Bethlehem, PA 18015-3170
phone 610-758-3035
fax 610-758-5605
-----Original Message----------
Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 10:10:44 -0500
From: Patrick Bickers (U. of Missouri-Kansas City)< BickersP_at_umkc.edu>
Subject: ACQNET: How came you to Acquisitions?
Hello Colleagues,
Over the years, I have gotten the impression that most of us did not
start our librarian careers with the idea of being acquisitions
librarians. I became interested in acquisitions because my first
SLIS-student job was as a firm order clerk. I would be curious to
know if most acquisitions librarians took a similar route, or if most
of us "inherited" our positions because "someone had to do it?"
Thank you for your comments.
Sincerely,
Patrick M. Bickers
Monographic Acquisitions Librarian
Miller Nichols Library
University of Missouri-Kansas City
800 East 51st Street
Kansas City, MO 64110
Phone: (816) 235-2225
Fax: (816)333-5584
email: bickersp_at_umkc.edu
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Received on Mon Jun 06 2005 - 16:51:11 EDT