Approval plans

Acquisitions librarians face a practical problem: no one can track the output of hundreds of publishers by hand. For more than three decades, libraries have relied on approval plans to obtain new titles, reduce staff workload, and assemble core collections. Those goals still matter as libraries work to keep collections current while managing shrinking staff and operating budgets, but the plans themselves involve intricate procedures, policies, and institutional politics. Approval Plans: Issues and Innovations gathers research from academic librarians and professionals working for approval vendors to explain the major issues and present new ways of solving them.

A well-written needs profile does not guarantee that the right books arrive. Problems keep surfacing, and the contributors take up questions that acquisitions and collection development staff, as well as library administrators, will want answered. Can duplicate titles be prevented? Do vendors regard small college libraries as worthwhile customers? How can technology improve these plans? What return rate is reasonable, and do hidden operating costs outweigh the advantages? The book examines how benefits to public services compare with the burden on technical services, the need for refined profiles to keep returns low, and the management of profile development, quality control, plan maintenance, overlap between plans, and vendor responsibilities.

The innovations discussed include extending approval plans to small college libraries, outsourcing cataloging and end-processing to vendors, using online services, the World Wide Web, and the Internet to improve communication among vendors, publishers, and libraries, and a set of criteria for choosing an automated acquisitions system. Because libraries are reconsidering how they buy books during a period of declining materials budgets, and because academic libraries are undergoing many changes, the volume speaks to a wide range of readers in that field.