ACQNET: What does "foreign" mean, anymore?

Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2008 10:05:31 -0500
From:  Stephen Corrsin (NY Public Lib.) <scorrsin_at_nypl.org>
Subject:  What does "foreign" mean, anymore?

Dear colleagues,

I'm hoping someone can advise. Nowadays, I frequently get the question,
"How much of what we buy is foreign?" especially from fiscal and management
people. I reply, I think truthfully, that it is very hard to say because of
globalization. For example, quoting from myself from an email this AM:

1/ Publishers have gone international, especially for some of the most
expensive material. Think as well of all the mergers that have been taking
place in recent years. (One good example of the confusion is the European
scientific journals published by companies based in the Netherlands
[Elsevier, Wolters] but presenting significant amounts of US-produced
content).

2/ Books are increasingly published simultaneously in different countries,
or close enough to simultaneously to be confusing (UK and US and Canada),
and this happens often enough that our major English-language approval
plans have to reflect this; i.e., they have provisions which refer to which
copy we get when something is simultaneously published in more than one
country. But it's not something you can easily predict; depends on the book
and the publisher both.

3/ It's not even predictable with language and country anymore. Obviously
we mostly buy English-language, but that includes not just US, UK, Canada,
and Australia-New Zealand. In many European countries (Germany,
Scandinavia, Netherlands, Poland all leap to mind), scholarly publishers
are putting out more new books translated into and first published in
English. And then there is South Asia; India and Pakistan produce a lot of
English language material we are buying.

4/ Our vendors are international, so we can't use that as a measure. To
pick our biggest: Blackwell is British but sells largely US books;
Harrassowitz is German, and sells us European materials, but also all sorts
of journals (including American ones); Swets is Dutch-owned, but we do
business with the American office... All these companies are "foreign" in
the sense of ownership and headquarters, but many of them largely sell to
the US market, and largely US materials.

To be blunt, I feel like a lousy weasel when I write something like this.
Has anyone developed a methodology to clarify this? (I'm sending our
financial people reports from major vendors, for the moment.)

Stephen D. Corrsin
Chief of Acquisitions
The New York Public Library, The Research Libraries
5th Ave & 42d St.
New York NY 10018-2788
tel 212-930-0839
fax 212-930-9258
scorrsin_at_nypl.org



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