From: Stefanie Wittenbach <stefanie.wittenbach_at_utsa.edu>
Attached is the file of responses I received regarding the retention
and use of publishers' catalogs. Many thanks to all of you who took
the time to respond! There are 10 pages of comments! Each response
is enclosed in double asterisks. I deleted the names of institutions
so that the survey is anonymous. It seems that many libraries route
subject-specific catalogs, but generally not the comprehensive
catalogs. Some libraries maintain an alphabetized collection of
catalogs. A large number simply toss most catalogs because they
depend on approval plan notifications, review sources, and publishers'
websites or e-mail notifications.
I hope this information is useful to all of you. Thank you again for
your feedback and input.
Stefanie
Stefanie Wittenbach
Assistant Dean, Collections
John Peace Library
The University of Texas at San Antonio
One UTSA Circle
San Antonio, TX 78249-0671
210-458-4887 voice
210-458-4577 fax
stefanie.wittenbach_at_utsa.edu
=======================================================
**We at the [name deleted] Public Library route publishers' catalogs
to the appropriate selectors.
The biggest problem is keeping them moving and not languishing on
someone's desk. Of course, looking at pub. catalogs is of lower
priority than the review publications (Booklist, et al.). However,
they are necessary for "stumbling upon" materials that are good for
our collections.**
**Hi Stephanie. We keep routing them to librarians, though if you
find others are not, I am sure that would be cheerfully eliminated
from workflow.
Having been a subject selector prior to working full time in
collection development and then acquisitions, I can think of two items
in 6 years that I actually ordered from a print catalog. Most of the
time, the catalogs never made it further than the trash bin (they're
glossy so can't be recycled) next to my mailbox. I've been amused a
few times when subject librarians have moved on to other institutions
and I have been assigned their subject areas -- my volume of mail and
my volume of [unread]garbage always increase correspondingly. I've
actually asked a few sales reps not to waste the paper, but of course
it's like politely stopping an avalanche.**
**Here at [name deleted] we still route catalogues from University
Presses and major publishers that publish in a wide variety of
subjects (Routledge, Gale). Subject specific catalogues (ie, Cambridge
University Press literary
publications) are sent to the appropriate subject librarian, who can
either keep or toss.
On a side note, we are considering doing away with this process
because of the duplication of effort resulting from copies of the same
catalogue arriving months apart.
I will be interested to read the results of your poll.**
**In the past we used to keep a mini-library of publishers' catalogs
in our office for bibliographers to use, but that fell by the wayside
quite some time ago. Our current practice is to distribute catalogs
to the bibliographer the catalog is addressed to or the bibliographer
whose areas the catalog most closely addresses. Then the
bibliographers may do what they like with it. I toss most of the ones
that come to me because I know I will see notices of their
publications in other contexts (approval plans, selection forms, etc.)
that are more efficiently dealt with. But when I know that I am
unlikely to see the notices anywhere else (small or specialized
publishers, area studies publishers, etc.) I do use the catalog. I
use publishers' web catalogs in the same way. Hope this helps!**
**At [name deleted] we toss 'em**
**We allow bibliographers to choose the kind of catalogs they wish to
receive, regardless of publisher. Bibliographers that prefer to see
general catalogs as well as catalogs specific to their subject
responsibilities can opt to receive both. Bibliographers that just
want to see subject catalogs can choose to receive only catalogs in
their subject area. The secretaries keep a routing list for the
general catalogs and the list is updated periodically. Catalogs that
have been routed are placed in a bin next to the selector’s mailboxes
in case anyone wants to browse. As catalogs become dated they are
weeded from the bin.**
**I'm on the mailing list for lots of publishers. Some of the catalogs I
check for their new titles and occasionally survey their list of back
titles to ensure we're not missing something important. Others go
directly into the trash or I send them along to a colleague who might be
interested. Years ago I spent a lot of time and effort to get my name
off mailing lists for unwanted catalogs, but with little success. I wish
publishers would survey the folks on their mailing list every year or
two and give us an opportunity to opt out. It would save them money and
the environment some trees.**
**Trash.**
**I pitch them. We rely on our approval profile to bring in what we
need.**
**I have been in collection development for public libraries for most
of my 33 years as a professional librarian.
Publishers’ catalogs were a big help in the pre-web days, but are not
kept as much now that so much is on the web.
The ones I keep are: university press catalogs, Spanish/multicultural,
hard-to-find materials (Nolo Press, John Deere, etc.), and Texana
catalogs. I tend to keep the catalogs if the materials are rarely
reviewed in the big national library publications.
Early on, I was taught to order from reviews & not catalogs, to have
good backup in case of a challenge. That’s why I tend to keep catalogs
only of material that is rarely reviewed.**
**I think at this point they are generally discarded. I occasionally
go through certain publishers myself.**
**Here at [name deleted], we immediately recycle at least 80 percent
of the printed catalogs we receive. It does vary by publisher--there
are a few that our bibliographers want to see, but not many.**
**This is a great question! Our medical library almost never uses the
publishers' catalog. They generally go straight into the trash. As
far as we're concerned they are a waste of money and trees.**
**I would say I divide the catalogs into 3 categories, which do
overlap a bit.
1. If it is a very targeted/subject specific catalog, I pass it on
the the liaison. If I get 2 copies at the same time, I might keep the
2nd for the files in my area.
2. If it is catalog that is targeted to areas that we don't buy in,
or for types of books that we don't buy (we're not a research library)
then I toss it.
3. We keep the other catalogs. I put them in a pile on a shelf
outside my office. Every so often, when times are slow, one of the
library assistants will take my pile & add the catalogs to a sorted
shelf of catalogs. She'll discard older catalogs at that time.
Normally, very few of these catalogs get looked at, they are just there.**
**we used to maintain a roomful of them! It was a huge burden on
student staff to keep it organized.
We have almost totally abandoned it now. Most of the bibliographers
prefer to find the needed information online.
We have even been proactive about it, emailing publishers with a
polite request not to send us stuff. But this too takes student staff
time and I really don't know how successful it is.
But these things die hard: we still get catalogs with addresses that
are more than 20 years out of date.**
**We do not route catalogs, but the reference librarian
gathers together ads for books and book reviews and regularly passes
them around to the librarians on the reference collection development
committee. We also route Library Journal to all the librarians in our
library so that we may recommend titles for purchase.**
**Publishers catalogues are still a good, reliable collection
development tool. I check them regularly - you can't scribble notes
on an online listing....unless you print it off.**
**If the catalog is subject specific, I route to the bibliographer in
that area. If it is a general catalog covering multiple subjects, I
toss it. It's too much trouble to route the catalog to more than one
bibliographer and I don't have the time to copy or separate sections
or pages to send to the bibliographer that it might benefit.**
**We've tried handling these various ways. At one time we had a list
of "approved' catalogs that were the only ones to be routed. But then
we felt the list got stale, new publishers wouldn't have a chance to
come to the selectors' notice, and we'd have to review the "approved"
list every year or so, something that never happened.
The way we're doing it now is: the mail person routes all catalogs to
the selectors. Also on the routing slip is a column where the selector
can say Yes or No to "See Again?" (And also, Save for Files?) The
mail person is supposedly keeping a spreadsheet where she fills in the
Yeses and Nos for each catalog so that the next time it is received in the
mail, she can print out catalog-specific routing slips. A fine idea
in theory, but I doubt she can keep up with the volume. Most likely,
she's probably routing all the catalogs to the selectors. It's up to
them whether they want to look at it or just scratch their name off
and pass on to the next selector.
One thing we have limited is Univ Press catalogs (since we are a
public library . We've limited it to about 5 or 6, and all the others
don't get routed. Also, the mail person only routes Juv/Teen catalogs
to the Juv/Teen selector. Or something that looks like it is only
History related to the History selector. And if the catalog turns out
to contain more than History, he will pass it on to the appropriate
selector, Literature for instance.
It's not an ideal system, but we all agree that we'd rather have the
option to not look at the catalogs once they arrive on our desk than
to not even see the catalog at all. Sometimes it's useful just to see
the cover and the publisher's name, just to have an awareness.**
**At the [name deleted] we no longer route catalogues. It became
apparent to us that often catalogues were mailed to a variety of
bibliographers, as well as to our Acquisitions and Collections
Management Depts. The routing we did was using more staff time than
it was worth, given that often librarians already had copies of the
catalogues. Years ago we even kept a carefully organized collection
of the latest copies of publishers' catalogues in our Acquisitions
Dept, but we also stopped doing that some time ago.**
**generally I toss them. Most of our selectors get the catalogs they
need or know how to find the publisher's web sites on their own.
However, I can't seem to get off mailing lists......**
**We still circulate publishers’ catalogs to our selectors. I
personally mostly use Choice cards and publishers’ websites and
various other online tools, and I have alerts set up with Wiley for
their new publications, but we still collectively browse through some
of the major publishers’ catalogs. (It seems to be something the
reference librarians can do while they are on the desk, when it’s
relatively quiet.)**
**Our staff distributes the catalogs the library receives to
librarians according to subject area. We don't route them further
than that unless one librarian thinks another might be interested. I
usually immediately toss catalogs from publishers covered by our
approval plan.**
**[name deleted] is a medium-sized university—FTE about 22,000 and
acquisitions budget about 3.5 million.
We used to keep an alphabetical file of publisher catalogs in the room
where our bibliographers review approval books and new acquisitions.
Tech Services staff put in the new catalogs and pulled out the
superseded ones. The file was always in very good order. It appeared
that no one ever looked at these. So we decided we would stop filing
the catalogs for two semesters to see if anyone noticed. There wasn’t
a comment or question during the whole time. We announced we were
eliminating the publisher catalogs file and there was no opposition.
So catalogs that come into Tech Services/Acquisitions are tossed.
Some of the bibliographers still receive some catalogs directly and a
few of them still peruse them. But they rely much more heavily on the
online alert services we receive from our book vendors and from Choice
Reviews Online.**
**yes, they circulate. Some people use them, some have lists of
specific catalogues they want and our library associate makes sure the
right ones get to everyone and see others just pass them on and
periodically search our Blackwell Collection manager system (online or
paper flexes). In science and engineering, we spend most of our budget
on journals and series.**
**We don’t have a standard written procedure for how to deal with
these, but almost all publishers’ catalogs are sent to me. I deal
with each catalog on an individual basis. Most catalogs are tossed
immediately. I try not to spend much time looking through catalogs
since the better method for selecting is online and reading reviews.
However, occasionally I will flip through some to find nice beautiful
hardback books (sometimes expensive--that we wouldn’t ordinarily
purchase) and tear out the page and put in a folder and they might sit
for a while. This is like a “wish list.” Books picked for the wish
list are somewhat timeless subjects like history, art, crafts,
compilations of photographer’s works, etc. When we get monetary gifts
that are not for specific items/subjects, I browse the folder to find
something that is close to the amount donated. Of course, I always
check to make sure the item has good reviews before it is ordered.
This folder is also handy if we receive more than expected money near
the end of the fiscal year which sometimes has to be spent quickly.
I also review North Carolina-related or regional publisher’s catalogs
since they often contain things that relate to our area or special
collections. I usually send genealogy, computer, travel, or
law-related catalogs (like Nolo Press) to our Reference Supervisor
since many of these books are not reviewed. Some AV catalogs are
useful to catch things we might miss or things that might have to be
ordered directly from that company. Of course, the ALA catalog is
always circulated among our librarians to check if they want a new
book for our professional collection. **
**Depends on the publisher, but most get tossed.**
**We do route them for review, although I have encouraged our subject
specialists to seek out more sources of reviews and to rely more on
those than the catalogs. Publishers' catalogs are good when you're
new to the job, I think, because they come to you. As I've figured
out more about each field, I've found a source of book reviews for
each subject area and have gotten those routed or e-mailed to me. I
still go through the publishers' catalogs (am in the middle of doing
so right now!), but I flip through them more quickly now and save the
careful reading for the reviews.**
**Our liasions and Faculty still use catalogs and even like us to send
selected pages cut out of catalogs according to their stated
interests. We tend to use University Press Publications catalogs for
our “clippings” as they have bigger pages and more descriptions.**
**The subject-specific ones are given to the appropriate bibliographer
(or the librarian whose name is on the address label). The ones I
toss are:
• those from publishers included on our approval plan
• very general catalogs, like everything published by a particular
publisher, not subject specific
We used to keep them all in a bookcase but no longer.**’
**I've been at this library for 27 years and the amount of actual use
our publishers' catalogs get is very limited. For 15 years, we had a
vertical file in Technical Services that volunteers spent countless
hours updating with these items. If there were 20 uses by the staff in
any given year, that was cause for comment -- generally, a half dozen
were pulled as the fiscal year wound down, to order materials with
last-minute funds. I used the covers as bulletin board art and for
displays. When I became AV Librarian, I followed tradition for 6
years, shuffling piles of catalogs in and out of drawers. Then I had
to share an office with a colleague, and suddenly realized there are
about 10 audiobook vendors, a baker's dozen video/DVD vendors and 2
music vendors whose products interest me. So now I have 25 catalogs in
my file drawers at any given time. I really don't need most of them,
since they are generally online, but I still do use them for a quick
look-up or to share information with colleagues. The Reference staff
have recently decided to toss all of the publishers' catalogs except a
handful that are kept on a common-use shelf...and I suspect they will
disappear next year, since usage is very low. The most extensively
used catalogs in our system are those for office and library supplies!
I'll be anxious to hear your survey results. **
**We are engaged in an approval program with Blackwell North America.
We've structured our profiles in such a way as to notify us of
education, nursing, and optometry books as they come through the program.
We have come to realize that certain publishers and/or categories of
publications are not completely covered by even by our best profiles.
We try to stay on top of the heavy hitters we need to order through
use of those publishers' catalogs, mailings and reviews in the
professional literature.
In Health Sciences we used to have the Brandon Hill lists of titles a
library should have on our shelves. The Brandon Hill lists have
ceased publication (one author died, the other tried to go it alone,
but needed to add a new reviewer, and then decided that they could not
do justice to the literature.
"Doody's Core Titles" have given us a different source for learning of
publications in our fields. I do reviewing for their annual list of
the multifaceted nursing publications.
We also hold a closed collection of standardized test. We solicit and
retain those publishers’ catalogs so that we may have the current
information needed by our students and faculty.
I'm sure we're missing some wonderful list of recommended titles, but
I haven't found it yet.**
**All the catalogs that come in to technical services, the directors
office, and other misc locations are forwarded to me. If they deal
with one specific subject, I will forward to the appropriate
bibliographer. General and multidisciplinary catalogs do not get
routed. I do scan many of them myself, usually very rapidly, for
titles in my subject areas and for my general collection development
responsibilities.**
**It depends. University presses are so well covered by our approval
plan we wrote them all and said please spare trees. Some of them
stopped sending and some didn't. We don't usually bother to route
catalogs from publishers who publish in all disciplines but we do
send niche catalogs to the right people.**
**Toss. I use the web pages of the publisher when needed.**
**If I receive the publisher’s catalogs in my direct mail and they
involve others, I route them. Generally, the selectors here get them
directly from the publishers.
However, I am sure that Technical Services tosses them.
So, a little of both.**
**We just shelve them in technical services and selectors can look
through them if they'd like. The only selection aid that we route is
Choice.**
**We route subject-specific catalogs to new bibliographers and to
bibliographers who've requested routing.**
**We used to route them but found that they often gathered dust in
someone's office for months at a time. Except for very
subject-specific catalogues (which go to the selector) we put them in
our workroom for a month or two and selectors can browse them or not
as they choose. Then they get tossed.**
**Here at [name deleted], we only route those publishers catalogs that
aren't on our YBP Approval and Notification Slip Plans Publisher List.
The subject liaisons are very grateful that we don't send them
everything as most of it ends up in the recycle bin anyway.**
**At [name deleted], they get tossed. For a brief period, they were
put in a box near the approval plan books; but no one looked at them.**
**We route university press catalogs amongst the librarians and
generally toss the rest.**
**We certainly receive fewer of them now than we used to. Routing
them among departmental colleagues doesn't work well -- they always
seem to get lost somewhere.
We don't toss them out, because they make excellent work sheets when
we have them in hand. You can mark them up with items that you wish
to purchase, and you and rip out a few pages and send them to a
faculty member with some notations. I still think that the human
eye can glance over a printer catalog faster then looking at it on a
web site, to get a sense of what is in the catalog and what you want
to purchase.
On the other hand, publishers' websites that are well designed (which
is not all of them!) include search engines that allow one to search
for a given topic over a range of publications, more effectively than
going manually through a catalog.**
**I usually go through the catalogs and distribute to the
bibliographers.**
**They are sorted and filed alphabetically by press name (nulling univ
of); first copies of subject specific catalogs are filed by subject,
dupe copies are sent to the liaisons, third copies are tossed. Every
day at lunch I take a pile of catalogs with me and I go through them.
When I am finished selecting from them I note on the back cover, the
date and SEL COMP; they then go to my monographic asst for searching
and ordering. I make notes like, Paperback only or PB if avail., or
check author holdings, etc, so I get a lot of related work done in the
process. I also get publisher alerts online, but I use these
differently than catalogs-- mostly for forwarding to faculty, checking
availability, etc.
Subject catalogs I provide to liaisons when they are slow/low ordering.
In a former position where CD was very faculty driven, I kept an open
library of catalogs, sorted as above, outside the CD dept, which was
where the leisure periodical browsing area was kept; this was a
publisher catalog browsing area. New faculty were always invited to a
party held in this area (and they attended, since I gave them an
"in-house" certificate good for a specified amount of money for new
books for new faculty, the new faculty book allocation, really just a
come-on, but effective), where they were introduced to the concept of
using the catalogs, and they did indeed use them-- they would sit in
comfy chairs and go through catalogs and drop them into a drop box.
It did stimulate ordering by faculty, esp. new faculty.**
**We circulate catalogs dedicated to specific fields of study to the
academic departments because we feel that they are better prepared to
access their specific needs. (Our staff is comfortable selecting
general handbooks, subject encyclopedias, etc., but they are more
expensive than monographs.)
We have problems circulating catalogs which contain publications
across multiple fields because the departments are scattered across
different locations on campus and they don't seem to communicate with
each other very well.
There are a lot of reasons I like publisher catalogs, but this does
not mean I am anachronistic, etc. I use e-alerts, publisher web
sites, e-slips, etc. I find that the portability, durability and
waterproofing, along with the ability to mark them up and make
comments and pass them back and forth and take them to the beach and
into the hottub, and always find your place quickly, etc. are assets I
like. I take them on vacation. I take them home, I take them to
lunch, I send them to faculty, etc.**
**I use catalogs as a primary tool in selecting books. I do most of
the collection development, so I don't route them to anyone else. But
they're definitely useful to me! And yes, I look at certain publishers
more than others.**
**What I do is route the subject-specific catalogs to the appropriate
bibliographer.
With more general catalogs, like University Press catalogs or
multi-subject catalogs, I've set up a shelf here in Collection
Development where we shelve those and I invite the bibliographers to
come down and look through them or take those they might want.
Some are tossed if they don't correspond to materials/subjects that we
collect, or when we get multiple copies of the same catalog.**
**At[name deleted], we route publishers catalogs that are subject
specific to the selectors. Multi-discipline catalogs are placed on a
shelf for the selectors to peruse but are recycled after a short time.
I toss many that I get from those publishers we don't purchase from.**
**I used to send catalogs to bibliographers, but ceased doing it.
Currently all publisher catalogs are placed in a bin in the
mailroom. It is up to individual librarians to look through them and
take what's of interest. They are recycled/discarded at the end of
each month. My impression is that few librarians look through the bin.**
**A colleague forwarded me your e-mail asking for feedback on the
routing of publisher catalogs bibliographers and other materials
selectors in libraries and also the degree of their utilization in
the selection process.
I can tell you from my perspective as an exempt, non-librarian
staff member of the Collection Development department at [name
deleted] (Arts & Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences),
that we still do route publisher catalogs, both internally within
our department and also, on request, to a select number of other
specialized libraries in our university library system, including
Law, Biomedical, Divinity, Management/Business, and Special
Collections (Science and Engineering, Education, and Music
declined).
We have our student assistants sort boxes of miscellaneous mail
that come to us periodically from our Acquisitions Dept. On the
whole, I tell students to distribute catalogs and other product
announcements to our subject specialists based on 2 considerations:
1) is the material advertised of a scholarly and academic nature?,
and 2) which bibliographer will benefit the most by seeing a
particular catalog or advertisement (if it would appeal to more
than one person and only one copy is available -- multiple copies
are distributed accordingly).
In general, we get a LOT of junk mail and other material that isn't
appropriate for our library which the students must sift through
and make independent decisions on after a fair amount of training
focused on what factors they should consider. Much of this material
does go directly into the recycling, either because it is not at
the academic level or isn't in the scope of our collection.
Materials that would be appropriate for those other libraries which
have declined to receive their catalogs and other unsolicited mail
automatically get recycled also.
Now, what happens to these materials once they get distributed
depends on the librarian. I think that most of them see these
catalogs as a real bother and just recycle them very soon after
they get them, while others may tend to hold on to a few university
press or other publisher catalogs that they know tend to publish
books in their respective subject areas, e.g. David Brown/BAR for
anthropology/archaeology.
Then, whether or not the catalogs that do get saved are ever really
used, I do not know. Proportionally speaking, I think that most
bibliographers in our library tend to work more off of vendor
slips, e.g. Blackwell's, Choice, Harrassowitz, Touzot, Casalini,
Puvil, etc., rather than from publisher catalogs, at least judging
by what shows up in the basket for our students to search in our
catalog.
I guess that of all our librarians, our specialist in
Spanish/Portuguese and Latin American studies tends to use a higher
proportion of publisher and vendor catalogs than the other
librarians do, but these materials are usually mailed directly to
her and don't show up in the general miscellaneous mail that I
described above. I think the main reason for this higher degree of
use is that [name deleted] research program in LAS, which our library
supports, is considered to be very active and well known, and we
therefore collect heavily in this area. We also recently received a
sizeable NRC grant to further develop our Andean Studies
collection, which now gets a lot of time and attention devoted to
it.
I can tell you, though, that given the less than enthusiastic
reaction that most of our bibliographers have to receiving
catalogs, as well as time/benefit considerations, we have been
thinking about discontinuing our current practice of sorting and
distributing publisher catalogs that we receive in the unsolicited,
miscellaneous mail. Recently, we were thinking of conducting an
internal poll ourselves to see if anyone would kick and scream if
they stopped receiving these catalogs. I have a feeling the only
person who would be upset by this proposal is our LAS
bibliographer. So far though this year, I've been training our new
students to perform this task.**
**We used to route publisher catalogs, but so many were of them were
inter-disciplinary in their content that we opted to create an
alphabetical file of them in our reference dept. When a new one comes
in, an older one generally gets tossed.**
**i tend to get my own copies and share them with the teaching profs--
they 'recommend' books for selection, and I think it takes less paper
for me to rip pages out of a catalog than to print out every title I
want to pass forward or keep track of. As a library, we don;t route
things though, and I've never thought about doing that for general
catalogs. We also get a number of catalogs at the library for former
colleagues, and these get distributed a few times each year to
appropriate selectors.**
Received on Sat Sep 08 2007 - 00:59:58 EDT