ACQNET v3n030 (March 24, 1993) URL = http://www.infomotions.com/serials/acqnet/acq-v3n030 ISSN: 1057-5308 *************** ACQNET, Vol. 3, No. 30, March 24, 1993 ====================================== (1) FROM: Christian SUBJECT: Who's new on ACQNET today (14 lines) (2) FROM: Janet Flowers SUBJECT: Acquisitions profession (33 lines) (3) FROM: Joe Barker SUBJECT: Acquisitions profession, staff morale (9 lines) (4) FROM: Barbara Boissonnas SUBJECT: Staff productivity (19 lines) (5) FROM: Wayne Perryman SUBJECT: _BIP Plus_ vs. _B&T Link_ (29 lines) (6) FROM: Pat Rice SUBJECT: Allergens in books (13 lines) (7) FROM: Catherine Wolfson SUBJECT: Paying for small purchases (26 lines) (1)------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: March 24, 1993 From: Christian Subject: Who's new on ACQNET today Diane S. Hollyfield Head of Acquisitions Virginia Commonwealth University Library E-mail: DHOLLYFIELD@RUBY.VCU.EDU Roxy Ann Zimmerman AUL For Technical Services & Collection Development National-Louis University Library E-mail: RZIM@NLU.BITNET (2)------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Mar 93 20:28 EST From: Janet L Flowers (Univ. of North Carolina) Subject: Acquisitions profession Thanks to all who responded so thoughtfully to my questions regarding how we do and should use our time as acquisitions librarians. It is clear that many of us are interested in and dedicated to the work we do. Many of us also put in extra hours while trying to achieve a balance with other interests and commitments in our lives. Knowing that others also have many local responsibilities and do not spend their days on external professional activities was reassuring as I sometimes feel inadequate when returning from a professional meeting where it appears that others are devoting large chunks of their time to contemplating and indeed fashioning a new future for the profession. It appears that we have multiple responsibilities, roles, and talents, all of which are needed by the profession. For each of us, what we do with the many choices before us determines the contributions we make. To all the trail blazers such as Joe Barker, I am in awe and concerned about burnout. To all those like myself who primarily try to do a good job running my department and caring about and for my staff, I would challenge us to become more involved in the professional issues. To those who balance the local responsibilities with realistic professional involvement, I urge you to speak up and tell the rest of us how you manage both while maintaining a reasonable comfort level in your personal life. This past week an Extern from the University of Virginia visited my department to help her decide if she wants to go into librarianship. It was energizing to talk about the value and importance of the work we do. It was gratifying to find that she was still interested at the end of the week! Despite complaints about busyness, we still are fortunate to have work in which we can feel challenged and take pride. (3)------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Tue, 23 Mar 93 08:15:08 PST From: Joe Barker (UC - Berkeley) (jbarker@library.Berkeley.EDU) Subject: Acquisitions profession, staff morale No, David, Acquisina is the true goddess of the "more smart than powerful." Keep the faith and keep pluggin' away. And, Laurie, it sounds like the University of Natal may be a Bezerkley sister institution? Hail! Hail! (4)------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Wed, 24 Mar 93 10:14:16 EST From: Barbara Boissonnas Subject: Staff productivity: A thought... I just read through the latest Acqnets and saw Joe Barker's posting about employee morale and ways they deal with it at Berkeley. Sounds like the quintessential **California** department! What interested me, though, was his comment that now that they had 25% fewer staff members, they were more productive, had less backlog and were more service oriented than ever. Does this reflect the "fat" of the eighties, or what? Is the cutback necessarily a "bad" thing, therefore? How did libraries operate in the old days, before the generous budgets? Is this a fulfilled prophecy of computers throwing people out of jobs? Is there anyone besides me who is not amazed by Joe's observation? Do other department heads report similar results? And, if there were suddenly a bunch of money dumped into Joe's department, would they up the salaries and bag the parties? What would happen to productivity, then? Maybe it's the nature of the workplace that has changed. Would anybody want to go back? (5)------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Tuesday, 23 March 93 07:45:12 CST From: Wayne Perryman (University of Texas) Subject: _BIP Plus vs. _B&T Link_ What with all of the recent thought-provoking discussion on the acquisitions profession, reports of the effect of last week's storm on the Eastern seaboard, ideas on how to reward staff contributions, and other life-defining matters, I hesitated (only briefly, mind you) to bring up a more mundane operational question -- but here goes... Has any institution undertaken a systematic comparison of _Books in Print Plus_ and _B&T Link_ (marketed by Baker & Taylor)? The promotional literature for the latter directly compares and contrasts these two products, but I wonder how they really stack up. I have requested a free trial copy of a _B&T Link/World edition_ CD-ROM, which I understand will be more comprehensive than the standard _BIP Plus_ since it includes U.K. and other non-U.S. English-language imprints. Have others already done such comparisons? If anyone would care to share their findings either directly or through ACQNET, I would appreciate it. One reason I am interested in looking into _B&T Link_ is that it is relatively inexpensive to network, compared with _BIP Plus_. If you have had occasion to network either of these tools, I would likewise be interested in your comments. Presently, we just have _BIP Plus_ on a stand-alone workstation but are considering mounting it on our CD-ROM network which uses a Novell server and a CBIS CDConnection over an Ethernet backbone. _B&T Link_ may prove to be a more cost-effective alternative if the coverage is comparable, especially for a large multi-building site. (6)------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: 23 Mar 1993 08:51:14 -0500 (EST) From: Pat Rice (Pennsylvania State University) Subject: Allergens in books In response to Rosann Bazirjian's message about a staff member's reaction to PL-480 books, I suffered just such a reaction while working at Yale University in the late 1960's. I have a vague memory of encountering some articles in the literature dealing with the problem, and that the source was indeed thought to be pesticides applied to the books prior to shipment. People who are interested in this topic might try a literature search back to the 1960s and 1970s. (7)------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: 23 Mar 1993 16:23:30 -0700 (MST) From: Catherine Wolfson (Univ. of Arizona) Subject: Paying for small purchases I have a comment to make in reply to Jeri Van Goethem. We have had problems in the past dealing with publishers in other countries and small purchases, at least in Great Britain. I wrote back to a few who returned our orders requesting payment in pounds sterling, saying that while I sympathized with their wish to avoid additional costs of currency conversion, it was nonetheless easier and considerably cheaper for them to do so than for us in desert southwest U.S.A. Pesos (for whatever they are worth) are readily available here, but no other currencies, and unlike Britain and Europe, where exchanges are available on virtually every corner, we have only one or two banks in town who are able to convert, and at a steep surcharge. I offered to send stamps equal to the amount of purchase instead, if the publisher just would not convert. A couple of them took me up on it. I also finally started buying all our British imprints from Blackwell (Oxford, England office). They were very willing to do business with us even though we could give them at most a few hundred dollars per year. Perhaps there might be some booksellers in other countries who would also be cooperative. ****** END OF FILE ****** ACQNET, Vol. 3, No. 30 ****** END OF FILE ******