ACQNET v4n021 (April 11, 1994) URL = http://www.infomotions.com/serials/acqnet/acqnet-v4n021 ISSN: 1057-5308 *************** ACQNET, Vol. 4, No. 21, April 11, 1994 ====================================== (1) FROM: Joe Barker SUBJECT: Future acquisitions librarianship (153 lines) (2) FROM: Ann-Marie Breaux SUBJECT: Bowker's _Global Books in Print_ (20 lines) (1)------------------------------------------------------------------------ From: Joe Barker (UC - Berkeley) Subject: Future acquisitions librarianship Date: Fri, 8 Apr 1994 06:41:40 -0400 I have read with some emotion the discussion on ACQNET spawned by Christian Boissonnas' "Whither Acquisitions librarians?" piece of 3/20/94. Apparently some read the title as "whether" and began worrying about whether there will be any acquisitions work in the future. I do not worry about that: for as long as libraries acquire collections, no matter of what format, there will be at least SOME acquisitions work to do. And there will be some acquiring going on for a long time in a number of libraries. The world of paper publishing and library acquiring will not die quickly. But dramatic, though gradual, change is within sight on the acquisitions horizon. THE MORE IMPORTANT POINT THAT CHRISTIAN RAISED IS THAT "A NEW LIBRARY PROFESSION WILL EMERGE." What is it going to look like? And will it have a role for acquisitions librarians as we know ourselves today? I have seen three recent indicators about this "new profession." One is the re-opening of UC Berkeley's former Library and Information Science School as the without-the-word "library" in its name. It is going to train its students to provide information to users, and it is going to graduate specialists in understanding the information needs and possibilities of both users and society. Libraries are among the kinds of institutions such graduates may serve. In other words, the new profession is a for a dynamic new role among information users, information providers/interpreters, and the society's information output and appetite. IF libraries manage to find a useful niche in this new dynamic, they may be occupy an important role in it. If they do not, libraries will tend the old paper archive in traditional ways and split off from the new profession of "INFORMATION DYNAMISTS." The second indicator about the new profession that I've seen recently is a job listing from the forward-looking University of Michigan. It has replaced its head of "collection development" (i.e., acquiring) with an Assistant Director for Access Services, Collections Management, and Electronic Resources. Document delivery, ILL, traditional collections (and all that money), networking, electronics, digitizing and preservation have been brought under one leadership umbrella in this job. I feel that it anticipates, like Berkeley's new information science school, the new profession of information dynamists. This job recognizes the blurring which will occur in libraries that survive into the future of electronics, access to remote or owned information, and collections and their probably electronic preservation for the future. This job is suggesting, I think, that a library that wishes to be more that a crumbling paper archive needs to put electronics and access ahead of traditional library collection- building/gathering/acquiring. There is definitely a shift in the winds of the future here: the location of information is immaterial to user satisfaction in electronics, whereas, with physically acquired collections, location is vital to any user gratification at all. The third indicator is the creation in the UC Berkeley Library of a new kind of technical service virtual department, the Electronic Texts Unit. It is made up of some librarians and staff with expertise in cataloging, acquisitions, special collections, pictorial collections, conservation, and systems/networking. Its members are scattered through the Library and the campus at Berkeley, and are studying new standards and languages such as SGML (Standard General Markup Language), and imaging and digitizing protocols. It is the group charged with transitioning to access to our electronic journals "collection," almost none of which is owned/ acquired by us, nor reflected in our regular online catalog. We have decided at Berkeley to put "selected" E-texts on a gopher with access to individuals or groups according to license agreement restrictions (if any). We have created a new kind of online catalog. So we don't need to acquire these things: their address elsewhere is put on our gopher and that's all. If payment is required, we use a regular order/payment record noting that the gopher-type access is in lieu of acquiring, so that our auditors will be happy. The only acquisition department event occurs when payment or renewal is needed, and it's a low-level clerical event. The new Electronic Texts Unit is another example of the trend towards the new profession of information dynamists. It is transforming for the new information dynamist library not only acquisitions, but also cataloging and preservation. And it acknowledges the transformation in our society of library services when document delivery, user satisfaction, selection, and reference services can circumnavigate acquiring. So, in my view, the silence of acquisitions librarians may stem from the denial (depression?) many of us hold about this future in which acquisitions' role is not very glamorous. Everyone else gets to learn new tricks, and we have to keep doing the old ones for as long as paper and/or other physical acquiring exist. Now, Acquisitions Librarians aren't a group, by and large, that likes to be eclipsed. Hence the denial. We are denying in order to glorify our old jobs, although we may intuitively sense that we are almost superfluous in the new profession of information dynamists. (BTW, I am not depressed about this. As I published in an article two years ago on "Acquisitions principles and the future of acquisitions: information soup, the soup- hungry, and libraries' five dimensions" (_LAPT_ XVII(i) 1993, p. 23-32,) acquisitions has pragmatic reasons to exist, and will exist only so long as the practical need for us abounds. We have much constructive work to do.) THE CHALLENGE FOR ACQUISITIONS LIBRARIANS IS NOT TO SUCCUMB TO THEIR OWN DEATH PREMATURELY. In any library, there is the need to interface between the publishing reality outside the library and the access systems and files within it. This interfacing is the process by which sources are nailed down, policies for terms of sale are set, money is managed, and a bridge is established between the raw publication coming from its source (in whatever format) and the access system or library file, shelf, or use. Acquisitions exists to provide that interface. Acquisitions stands midpoint between the cataloging/access/availability within the library and the sources without. As computers and others make it possible to perform that interface outside our departments' control, it may appear to discontinue, but it still survives no matter how transparently or briefly. We need to remain strong in working with publishers and vendors, and collection managers as well, not only because paper collections are still being built. We also need to remain strong because the day will come when the publishers and vendors will try to sell electronic publications in exactly the same way they are selling paper and CD now. When this happens, we acquisitions folks need to there to make sure that such a wasteful thing is not done. When this happens we need to be strong enough to preside over our own demise and burial. The ordering and receiving/check-in process ought to be automated directly to the user, leaving the acquisition department's mail-table-and-receiving-units equivalent completely out of the loop. Just publish it to the gopher or whatever access system will offer it to the public. And we'll pay the bill electronically too, I hope. (We need to work on our accounting offices and X12.) We need to be around to be sure that virtual departments like Berkeley's Electronic Texts Unit do their job with auditability and ethical business practices, and we may get involved in helping negotiate some site licenses, but then we can step back and relax. Electronic acquisitions should be automatic. No work for us. And we are in the best position to foresee this elegant future. In the new profession, much of that acquisitions-interface should be handled by computers. By using our intimate awareness of the interface with the real publishing world we are uniquely qualified to guarantee that the true parallels between current functions and those of the future are exploited to keep library work efficient and fiscally accountable. We are positioned to ensure that the future library runs smoothly, albeit perhaps without us someday. There will be less for us to manage and direct, as the paper acquisitions world decreases a lot (and it will in many libraries). So we may want to get trained for an Electronic Texts Unit, a virtual department and virtual acquisitions. In talking about this future, I am reminded of a paradox once used by the early gay-rights activist Harry Hay. He said that to understand the gay mentality, one must look beyond what is now understood of men and women because gays are "some combination of neither." Likewise, technical processing in the future is some kind of combination of an alternative to acquisitions, cataloging, and conservation. DO YOU ALL AGREE? (2)------------------------------------------------------------------------ From: Ann-Marie Breaux (Harvard University) Subject: Bowker's _Global Books in Print_ Date: Fri, 8 Apr 1994 16:26:05 -0400 We have received the demo disk and first month's disk of _Global Books in Print_ from Bowker. We were intending to use this as a replacement for _BIP+_ and Whitaker's _BIP_. However, we have not been satisfied with it. We miss the author/title (4,4) search. It seemed to make up for some of the problems that punctuation in records caused in strong searches. I know that keyword searches with truncation also usually work, but you have to type more than an author/title search, and you still have to truncate. Also, some of the British citations do not have publisher names. There is an ISBN and price, but no publisher. We could get the publisher from OCLC or from an ISBN prefix search in our local system, but that seems like extra work. I have a hard time justifying spending $500 more to replace _BIP+_ and the hardcopy Whitaker's _Books in Print_ with this product. I was wondering if any one else had tried _Global Books in Print_ and what you thought of it. Any comments or thought would be appreciated. ****** END OF FILE ****** ACQNET, Vol. 4, No. 21 ****** END OF FILE ******