Pergamon Library Acquisitions: Practice & Theory, Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 129-134, 1997

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FEATHER RIVER INSTITUTE 1996

REVIVAL OF OLD VISIONS IN LIBRARY MATERIALS VENDING

DANIEL P. HALLORAN

President

Academic Book Center

5600 Northeast Hassa lo Street

Port land, O R 97213-3699

Internet: danh@acbc . com

At last year' s Charleston Conference, I sat through several days of papers on changes in libraries and scholarly communication. There were interesting discussions on the effect of new electronic media, the implications on copyright of document delivery, and the challenges facing publishers in deciding how to use the Internet in disseminating their material. In conversations with librarians and booksellers, the topics were similar but also touched on the increasing workloads and decreasing resources. It seemed as though everyone was looking for new answers to new problems. These new challenges seemed to need totally new solutions. But I was also struck by the fact that solutions to some of the day-to-day problems, such as efficient acquisition of monographs and series, the centralized use of information, and the outsourcing of various library functions, have been around for many years. The intent of my talk today is not to solve every problem and new challenge facing librarians, but to suggest that solutions to some of the problems have been around for many years. Looking at the evolution of bookselling over the past 40 years might help us better understand what those solutions might be.

The role of booksellers serving the specialized market of college and university libraries has been that of middleman. For a long while these booksellers were confined to acting as a middleman between libraries and publishers. We were a conduit for books and information. The value booksellers added was to reduce the number and kind of contacts that libraries had with publishers by providing specialized knowledge and processes. For libraries this meant lower transaction costs and the right book--the hallmark of a good bookseller~uickly, at a competitive price. The evolution of the bookseller's role has been, and will continue to be, as a middleman or integrator, not only with publishers but increasingly with bibliographic utilities and library systems vendors. This is not a radical change in our role but a natural evolution.

In the 1950s, the scholarly communications environment was much different from today. The

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publish or perish syndrome had not yet begun; the number of publishers and publications was much smaller; there were fewer students and researchers; books were purchased through specialized dealers or direct from publishers; there was only very crude sharing of cataloging information; and automation was an IBM Selectric typewriter. The same slow and inefficient selection, acquisitions, and cataloging functions were performed over and over in many different libraries.

Into this environment Dick Abel began bookselling in the early 1950s. Abel's original idea was to make books available to faculty and staff at Reed College. In an Against the Grain interview Abel talked about this, "At that point there was a terribly enlightened view among the faculty that all the College was doing was showing these kids how one learns and how it is one finds out about things and the way to find out about things is with books. And the way to be able to find out about things efficiently is to have books of your own, so that you go to your own shelves and you get the fundamental books, the books that are critical, off your own shelf" [1]. Thus, the concept of a bookseller offering comprehensive service to libraries came from a college bookstore offering a small, but very sophisticated, audience the books they needed for their own personal use.

The word spread quickly in Oregon that there was a bookseller in Portland who could actually get books from a wide variety of sources. Libraries acquired material by buying from general purpose wholesalers such as B&T, subject specialized wholesalers such as Staceys for STM material, and direct from publishers. There was no central source for all the material a library needed. Abel's breakthrough was to understand the need for a single, comprehensive source of books and to develop the systems and expertise to provide it. During the next two decades, this became increasingly important. As research increased in importance as part of the universities' mission, the number of titles published and purchased by libraries increased. It now seems obvious that Abel's basic bookselling ideas have helped libraries fulfill their research mission.

Abel worked with libraries not only to acquire material but to tackle other inefficiency problems as well. This included reporting on unfilled items (publishers still do not know how to do it), advancing the concept of one order per slip of paper, customizing invoices to library specifications, and creating a customer service department that actually solved library problems. What Abel was doing was centralizing the process of acquiring books and bringing into one organization the information, resources, and expertise to do the same function for a large number of customers. In replacing the many relationships libraries had with publishers, Abel was making this single relationship with a bookseller as efficient and effective as possible. This was an additional element of value provided by a bookseller. Booksellers have evolved these basic services by adapting new technologies. These include giving libraries online access to their databases, 800 telephone number access to customer service people, E-mail for most communications, EDI communication between library and bookseller systems in the near future, and shelf-ready books. Yet the basic, underlying concept was developed over 40 years ago and has only been enhanced since then.

Comprehensive firm order services were not Abel's only innovation. He also changed collection development. Abel had begun buying for his inventory by anticipating the types of material his customers were ordering. As libraries became new customers, Abel would study the university's catalog and factor into his inventory buying the courses and teaching level at that institution. When a new publisher catalog arrived, Abel would factor in the knowledge he had of his customers and buy a certain number of copies of each title for stock. This enabled the company to provide some portion of a library's orders faster because their needs had been anticipated and books were in inventory when orders were received.

The acquisitions librarian at Washington State University mentioned that many of the books they ordered from Abel were coming quickly. He said that Abel seemed to know what the library needed even before the library knew [2]. After mulling this over for several weeks, Abel formulated the idea of automatically sending books to the library based on his knowledge of the courses being

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taught. The titles would be "on approval" and would only be kept if accepted by the library. Abel approached the library with this new concept and persuaded them to become a guinea pig. Working with the library, Abel and the library staff created the first approval profile, including subject and non-subject parameters. Once the concept proved workable, it was introduced to a wider group of libraries and became immensely popular. At one point the concept was so popular that Jim Cameron, Abel's manager in Denver and a mentor to many of us, said that if he drove into a library's parking lot, honked his horn, and if the acquisitions staff didn't come out within 30 seconds, he would drive on to the next library. This new approval program was that popular.

Again, Abel demonstrated that by centralizing information and processes, it was possible for libraries to get more with less. Bibliographic information was stored and used repeatedly so that libraries could get books into their libraries faster and cheaper than their old procedures. Today the only serious opposition to approval plans is the question of whether collections are becoming too homogeneous. There is little question that approval plans get new books into libraries quickly after publication and cost effectively.

Today many booksellers offer approval plans, and they have evolved Abel's original concept to make it even more useful. The Abel model had three basic assumptions. First, that the process should be mechanical. He believed it was possible to use detailed subject and non-subject parameters both to create a library profile and to describe the nature of a title. By comparing a book profile to the library profile you could determine which books should be sent to the library automatically. No human intervention was needed in the process other than at the profiling stage. When IBM mainframes became widely available, they were used to make the process entirely mechanical. The computer became a toot for deciding which books would be sent on approval.

Today's best approval plan vendors have created a new approach by recognizing the importance of human judgment in the selection process. Computers can make objective decisions, e.g., price, series, publisher, and to a certain extent subject, but the final decision needs to be made by someone skilled in book selection with specific and intimate knowledge of a particular library's collection. Books are not objects that fit into neat, convenient slots but are unique and individual. The nuances of treatment and changes in the scope of knowledge make it difficult to describe a book in such a way that you can base selection decisions for all libraries on that description. Putting people in the process allows for almost infinite flexibility.

Second, Abel created a completely new list of subject descriptors that required a large staff to apply to each new book. Abel's unique classification scheme prevented the utilization of work done by LC in its CIP and MARC programs. In the Abel approach, books were "cataloged" a second time, using the Abel scheme. I believe not using similar work done by others, in this case LC, was a step backward. A modern modification to Abel's model is to use the LC classification scheme for creating library and book profiles, which is available for 90%-95% of the books that are shipped automatically on approval plans, for the information that drives selection decisions. Combining the LC information and information available from publishers with a person skilled in book selection overcomes the shortcomings of the LC system and allows for the reuse of work done by others. It also uses the bookseller's human resources to make actual book selection decisions with book in hand, not in redoing work already done by LC. Again we see an evolution of the original concept to incorporate new and changing technologies.

Finally, Abel's goal was to bring every book in the world through the approval system and make every title available for sending to every approval library if appropriate. The concept was that through adequate profiling of books and libraries you could get exactly the books needed into each library. At a time when budgets were virtually unlimited, and growing, this made sense. But there were problems. Librarians wanted to know what would be arriving on the plan. Acquisitions people needed to prevent duplication of books on firm order. Staff had to be able to tell professors that a

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particular title would be available. As library budgets became less generous in the 1970s, libraries looked for ways to reduce the size and scope of their plans and to solve the "will it come" problem. One solution was to work from a list of " co re " publishers, making approval plans more predictable and manageable. Today every company offering approval plans works from a defined list of publishers from which a library can pick and choose. This list may be augmented with publishers that a library can choose to receive information and buy on a firm order basis, but the " co re" of every approval plan is still a defined list of publishers. Another solution was to give librarians direct access to this information over the Internet and thus reduce the need for an intermediary at the bookseller to retrieve and communicate the information.

For properly administered programs, these changes now allow return rates to be in the 3%-7% area. This is extremely important when we begin to talk about outsourcing, because shelf-ready approval books (an oxymoron because once books are shelf-ready they cannot be returned or sent "on approval") is only cost effective in a low return rate approval plan. We will talk about this more is a little while. A comprehensive standing order service was also developed as an adjunct to the approval plan. It was necessary to coordinate books being sent automatically on approval with the standing orders libraries had for books in series. Without this ability, there were problems of duplication and non-supply. As Abel solved this problem, he created a new service.

The advantage to the library was the ability to place an order for virtually any book of a continuing nature and know that it would arrive. Abel again was performing the function of acquiring information once, then making it available to a large number of libraries. In this case it was creating a comprehensive bibliographic database, chasing titles, and following up on un- shipped items. Instead of many libraries doing this individually, it was done in one place for many libraries. Libraries were offered an inexpensive yet comprehensive solution to another problem.

This leads me to Abel 's last great idea but one that is only now being seriously considered. In September 1968, fresh out of college, I took my first real job as a management trainee for Richard Abel & Co. Portland was having a lovely late summer with sunny days and temperatures in the 80s. During the first week of orientation, I came across an operation set up in a parking lot behind one of the Abel buildings. In the morning employees would fill the parking lot with lunch tables, cover each table with 3 x 5 cards, then spray paint them with varnish. The cards were left to dry, then gathered up, and rubber-banded into small packets of 5-10 cards each. Then the process started again, This was "outsourcing." Outsourcing, you ask? These were catalog cards, remember those, being sprayed with varnish. Early samples had ended up in library catalogs only to smear when patrons started thumbing through them. The varnish was to protect the surface and give the cards a longer useable life. (If anyone still has a card catalog with old Abel cards, I would be interested to know if they have survived 25 years.)

Abel understood 30 years ago, at about the same time as Fred Kilgour, that libraries were spending too much money cataloging and processing books. Studies done over the years have consistently shown that the technical service costs per book have been equal to or exceeded the actual cost of the material. He developed a service, at about the same time OCLC was growing, that offered shelf-ready books to libraries. In the very early stages it involved finding and photocopying appropriate entries in the NUCs, keypunching the information, then printing the cards (and spraying them with varnish). The information was stored in a database for use by other libraries; in other words, it was copy cataloging. At this stage Abel, a bookseller, became a middleman between libraries using cataloging and libraries contributing cataloging to the NUCs. Abel was now jobbing cataloging as well as books. The bookseller's role had evolved again to meet the needs of library customers.

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Copy cataloging had a more significant development outside Abel. The development after the NUCs was libraries acquiring MARC tapes and creating local MARC databases. The cataloging was now being done once by LC, but stored and retrieved in many different locations. It was a step in the right direction, but staff in many libraries were still creating and searching multiple databases that contained the same information. The next iteration in development was the rise of the bibliographic utilities that helped eliminate this duplication of effort and made many locally unique records available to a wider audience. Recent budget squeezes have forced librarians to reevaluate all of their processes including cataloging. Although copy cataloging has helped reduce the time and cost of traditional cataloging, new solutions are needed. Outsourcing, buying a product or service from a source specializing in that product or service, has become the next idea. In this instance it is the outsourcing of copy cataloging and shelf-ready preparation.

Abel had the idea originally. Now with the cooperation of the bibliographic utilities and booksellers, it is evolving into an important new service. OCLC made the first significant change when it introduced its PromptCat service. For the first time, libraries could receive copy cataloging automatically, ordered by their bookseller as a by-product of their billing programs. The bookseller notifies OCLC when books are billed. OCLC finds the appropriate record in its database, and as the books are being shipped to the library, OCLC electronically ships the cataloging records to the library. The record can even contain special localized information such as invoice numbers, pricing, bar code numbers, and more--all provided by your bookseller. What is most important for this discussion is the realization that your bookseller has taken a significant role as a middleman in connecting libraries with a biblio- graphic utility. Just as the bookseller has played that role in getting your books, so he now does in getting your bibliographic records.

The next evolution of the process, the one I alluded to when talking about reducing the approval return rate, is the actual shelf-ready processing of approval books. If approval plan return rates are below 5%, it makes sense to discuss the possibility of having your bookseller actually apply spine labels, property stamps, etc., before the books arrive. In that way over 95% of the books you receive on approval can go from the box to the shelves within hours of being received. For me this is a natural and intelligent evolution of the role of a bookseller in helping libraries to solve problems. From the early 1950s, when libraries were repeating the same tasks of ordering material, cataloging, and processing locally at a great cost and a not very timely manner, to today when it is possible to work with sophisticated booksellers who are able to coordinate the products and services of publishers and bibliographic utilities to get books on library shelves within weeks of being published, the role of your bookseller has been to coordinate the books and bibliographic information you need with the companies producing them. The booksellers role has not so much changed as evolved and adapted to the changing environment in which we work. Our central role, of getting the right book, quickly, at a fair price, is getting more complicated and more demanding. Remember, booksellers are not manufacturers. We are service organizations that organize the chaotic publishing world and its output, and present the results to the very organized but diverse library world. I see our role as a facilitator continuing beyond books into the kinds of services that libraries need to maintain efficiency. We must keep in mind that our role is to provide information and some of the tools for organizing it. And we need to facilitate the relationship between producers of information (the publishers) and producers of the organizing products (OCLC and other cataloging producers or distributors), and then provide to our library customers the specific products among all these that they choose.

While the world around us, the environment in which we all work, seems to be changing rapidly,

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most of it is really not changing at all. It just seems that way at t imes. But like all good navigators,

we should check our instruments frequently, pay attention to the stars, and keep our course.

R E F E R E N C E S

1. "Against the Grain," June 1992, p. 25. 2, Abel, Richard. "The Origin of the Library Approval Plan," Publishing Reseatz'h Quarterly, (Spring 1995), 5.