- Email: [email protected]
The approval plan of smaller scope
Library Acquisitions: Bocticeond
0364-6408/85
Theory, Vbl. 9, pp. 13-20.1985
Copyright
Printed in the USA. All rights reserved.
ISSUESINBOOKANDSERIAL
THE APPROVAL
Q 1985 Pergamon
$03.00+.00
Press Ltd
ACQUISITIONS
PLAN OF SMALLER
SCOPE
L. HUNTER KEVIL
Technical Programs
Representative
Raker &Taylor
Co.
6 Kirby Avenue Somerville. NJ 08876
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the topic of small academic libraries and approval plans. The principal area of concern will be the liberal arts college, but everything said will be generalizable to most small- and medium-sized academic libraries. There are two premises fundamental to this paper. The first is that approval programs are underutilized by academic libraries generally, and by college libraries in particular. This strong correlation between the size of a library and the likelihood it will use an approval plan is rather perverse, since making full use of the services provided by an approval vendor is a very important way a small library can overcome some of the many disadvantages of its small scale. It is ironic that those who have most to gain from an approval plan use it least. The second premise is that while existing approval plans are not perfect and many college libraries have experienced various obstacles in starting up a plan, the root difficulty underlying the low incidence of approval use stems from imperfect perceptions of what an approval plan can and cannot actually do, from lack of knowledge of how to make the plan work and derive maximum benefit from it. This paper will be structured so that after some definitional preliminaries, the most commonly expressed arguments for not using an approval plan in a college library will be cited, discussed, and refuted when necessary. Next will be discussed some of the myths and misconceptions of selecting books for a college library (particularly when faculty do the selecting); the paper will conclude with some suggestions for successfully conceptualizing and then setting up an approval program in a college environment. *** Common terminology notwithstanding, there should be a clear-cut distinction between an approval plan in the proper sense of the term on the one hand, and the multitudinous blanket or standing order arrangements, or gathering plans, on the other. While all provide for the automatic shipment of books, the approval plan is clearly different in that it is far more sophisticated because it is intended to solve a number of problems peculiar to academic and 13
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KEVIL
research libraries. The term “approval” may be responsible for some confusion. Returnability is a nice feature of current plans, but it is not of prime importance. SPEC Kit 83, Approval Plans in ARL Libraries [II identified over 200 approval vendors, including Amnesty International Canada, Tower Records, and the State Department of the U.S.S.R. The definition of “approval” that produced this list is implausibly broad, perhaps because it laid too much emphasis on returnability. The term “approvaf,” with its possible associations of receiving on approval postage stamps from stamp dealers, is doubtless responsible for much of the confusion. But the term is now standard, and we will have to live with it. Let us now define, for the purposes of this paper, exactly what constitutes an approval plan. Here are two definitions, the first centering on the operational point of view, and the second on that of collection development.
De~~iti~n 1. An approval plan is a sophisticated armngement between an academic or research library and a vendor, whereby: (1) the vendor selects for approval treatment all new titles in a well-defined area, and profiles those selected as to subject and formal characteristics; (2) the library draws up a “profile” of subject, nonsubject or formal, publisher, and series decisions reflecting its collection development policy; and (3) the vendor matches each new title against the library’s profile and sends automatically on approval all positive matches.
De~nitjun 2. An approval plan is a means of collecting a well-de~ned selection of current imprints and is used by libraries conceiving their collection development responsibilities, not in title-by-title terms, but in terms ofcovering publishing output. In simpler language, there should be a pipeline with a set of filters, the pipeline to bring into consideration all new books, and filters to block shipment of those books the library has decided it does not want to consider for acquisition. The system of pipeline and filters should be constructed so that a good translation of the collection-development policy into a good approval profile is possible. The best way to define an approval plan is to focus on the goals, rather than on what is done to achieve them. Thus any arrangement satisfying these three goals could legitimately be considered an approval plan: (1) to reduce costs and speed processing in the acquisitions department; (2) to enhance the quality of book selection and simplify the work flow associated with collection development; (3) in particular to reduce the informational costs associated with the library’s acquisitions and collection development activities by means of these vendor. functions: (a) by performing preselection in a wellde~ned, predictabIe, consistent manner (usually this involves “running” the library’s profile against this week’s batch of new titles); (b) by not capriciously withholding titles from approval treatment (i.e., by defining a comprehensible section of world monographic output and rigorously treating for approval all new titles). This requires the vendor to perform publisher contact and bibliographic searching functions; (c) by supplying bibliographic slips and ensuring that the bibliographic data are up to the highest professional standards, This requires the vendor to perform many of the functions of a technical services department; (d) by making available to the library reports of approval activity suitable for management purposes.
The Approval
Plan of Smaller Scope
15
Notice that returnability does not necessarily follow from these goals, although in practice it is always available. The requirement that an approval program should reduce a library’s informational costs significantly is central to the concept of approval, though it has not been mentioned directly in the literature. The full benefits of an approval plan will not be realized without such a reductionthat is, the library will duplicate on its own much effort already expended by the vendor, or easily supplied by it. Realization of these benefits is particularly important for academic libraries, which are responsible for covering a much broader proportion of the world’s monographic output than are public and special libraries. By this definition of approval programs, there exist scarcelv more than half a dozen vendors, not the 200 or so identified in the ARL SPEC Kit cited. *** The literature dealing with the college library has not been kind to approval plans. Let me cite two exponents of the case against them in the college library and, while discussing their reasoning, give the case for them. The first exponent is Guy Lyle in his well-known Administration of the College Library: While there has been a definite trend toward adopting approval gathering plans by university libraries, college librarians have refrained for both financial and bibliographical reasons. Financially the college library has very little free money after paying for fixed charges such as serials, continuations, and binding; secondly, the financial outlook of the college library since the beginning of the seventies has been too uncertain and unstable to make any additional commitments. Bibliographically college librarians for the most part resent the idea of vendors and publishers doing their selection for them. The college librarian is apt to think that he can do this better for himself, with the help of his faculty colleagues. In the midst of specialists, he likes to think that he has one specialty even though he is a generalist, and that is bibliography and the ability to select books 121.
The second critic of approval programs is Bob Santos: Sizable approval plans I believe are counter-productive to small libraries. They take time to administer, to profile, and to select from. Return rates can get high as selection rates by small libraries (sic]. Also, many inappropriate works are chosen because of selection by impulse rather than from need. I would recommend the placement of standing orders to many of the tine series that are available, though. Certainly, one other medium to utilize is the classic one-the bibliography 131.
The arguments boil down to these: (1) College libraries haven’t enough money to support an approval plan. (2) Committing oneself to an approval plan in a period of unstable budgets is imprudent. (3) The library should not let a vendor perform its selection for it. (4) Selection can be done best by the generalist librarian, with assistance from the faculty. (5) Approval programs take too much time to administer. (6) The return rates will be unacceptably high. (7) Having the book in hand can result in poor selection (“selection by impulse rather than from need”). (8) Book acquisition by standing order and from perusal of bibliographies is superior. While some of these arguments have me *it(and some do not), there is a “flip” or positive side to each. Lyle’s generalization that college libraries do not have a sufficiently large enough book budget to support an approval plan cannot be applied to all colleges. Most vendors use a figure of $50,000 as a rule of thumb; generally a library with a budget for current imprints of this magnitude or greater can make an approval arrangement work. There are, of course, exceptions: libraries with smaller budgets and a successful approval plan of long standing, and libraries with
16
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much larger budgets in which the approval concept never took root. The variables here are the library’s desire to have an approval plan, and the ability to make the physical and conceptual adjustments necessary to accommodate the new approval arrangements into an existing system of work flows and multiple constituencies. Lyle’s second point is that a library’s committing to an approval plan in a period of budget uncertainty is imprudent. But there is no need for the library to commit itself this way. Even the libraries required to use contracts have escape clauses. There is no vendor with the desire-or the legal power-to compel a library to accept books. Indeed, during the period of financial uncertainty of the seventies, approval vendors become quite adept at stopping approval shipments on an instant’s notice. Usually the library will be supplied with notification slips or forms in lieu of automatic books until the beginning of the new fiscal year, or the “unfreezing” of the book budget. There is no risk to the library in this, and picking up the pieces and starting up afresh is readily accomplished. There may even be an advantage in having an approval plan, if the college administration can be persuaded that the plan is a continuing obligation-like the periodicals budget -and should not be cancelled, even temporarily. This has been successful in a few instances. Another consideration is that a scholarly book can usually be bought at a lower price on approval than as a firm order. This is an important consideration if a college library wants to stretch its small book allocation and acquire as many books as possible. Lyle’s third point brings up the old but very persistent myth that a library with an approval program lets a vendor do its selection for it. This is simply untrue. The job the vendor wants to do is preselection, not the actual selection, which is done at the library. This preselection is accomplished by the library’s profile which, of course, is a record of its collection development policy. To the extent that this record is accurate, preselection will simply exclude those titles library policy would have excluded (textbooks or books not in English, for example), and will send for consideration those titles the library has determined its selectors should see. Selection can then be done at the library in the best way, with book in hand. Don’t be confused by the similarity in terminology: preselection is not selection; it is, simply, the application of a “Clter” to exclude what the library knows it does not want. Preselection enhances library selection by giving information about what will not be shipped to it, thus permitting a more concentrated attention to the books in hand. This leads to Lyle’s fourth argument and Santos’ last one: book acquisition is best done by standing orders and by firm orders generated through the bibliographic skills of the generalist librarian, with faculty help. By bibliographic skills, I assume Lyle and Santos are referring to consultation of national bibliographies, book reviews, lists of books received in the best journals, the limes Literary Supplement, even the bibliographies and references in the best new books in a discipline-all the tricks of the trade of the subject bibliographer in a major research library. There is much to criticize in this point of view, even by a committed generalist librarian. Placing standing orders by series can be very worthwhile, but this involves committing the library budget for new titles sight unseen, and in effect assigning one’s selection responsibilities over to the editors at the publishing houses. It would be inconsistent to criticize approval plans for these reasons and at the same time to exempt standing orders from criticism. The preference for firm orders placed by the generalist college librarian, with faculty input, is more interesting and difficult. How can a college librarian, who is responsible for covering all academic fields except some of the professional and vocational ones restricted to graduate or community-college programs, successfully measure up to Lyle’s ideal? What college library can afford a good selection of national bibliographies or a representative selection of journals in all the disciplines taught? What college librarian will have the time to read the best reviews and
The Approval Plan of Smaller Scope
17
in the best new books, generate orders from them in the right balance, and fit all this in with the on-going process of satisfying faculty requests? Let me put my objection another way: while the college librarian may generate as few as 1/ 10 or 1/ 20 the quantity of firm orders as the bibliographer at a research library, he or she still must perform nearly as much bibliographic research as the research-library bibliographers, if the goal is to make the best possible selection and not create gaps in the collection. In other words, selection, to be fully effective and rational, must take place with reference to the totality of possible choices, not just a haphazard sample. College librarians, despite the expectations of some patrons, do not possess superhuman bibliographic skills. Most research libraries find the collection development argument for using approval plans compelling. These arguments are just as compelling for the college library, with its very limited bibliographic resources and still more limited staffing. Lyle admits that “the college library simply does not have staff funds” 141for full- or even part-time subject specialists and selectors. Why not, then, let the vendor do as much bibliographic work for it as possible, perform a preselection based on its stated needs, and then send it automatic books in the right quantity for each subject so the college librarian can make the final decision to keep or reject with book in hand? Lyle might object that with good faculty help he can make his system work-agreed. The real question is which kind of arrangement can more easily or more positively be made to work. We can doubt that the kind of faculty cooperation Lyle needs will ever be more than a rare, welcome exception. There are, however, problems even with a cooperative faculty. For example, the faculty representatives may be out of town during the summer or on sabbatical leave. There can be long periods of time before the previous representative is replaced by the new one. All of this can create gaps, either because titles are missed, or because books ordered too late after publication are unavailable. It is very difficult for the scholar who is a specialist to avoid selecting too much material in his or her area of expertise. There is another danger in faculty selection. The professional work of a faculty member is premised on the existence of a qualitative hierarchy, the fact that a piece of scholarship will eventually be ranked on the sale of “good/ indifferent/ bad.” Teachers (and the rest of us) will tend to buy for our personal libraries only the best books. But selection for a library based on this kind of qualitative hierarchy will not be fully successful-not only because notions of what the best books are will be very different, but also because the library should represent a balanced selection of points of view and, indeed, because the library should buy even “bad” books, when they are important, influential, or otherwise useful. These difficulties are compounded when the faculty are uncooperative (e.g., they won’t send over many orders, but still will not delegate purchasing authority to the library). The virtue of an approval program is that at least a modicum of collection balance can be assured, irrespective of whether faculty are available to review the approval books or to send in firm orders. A liberal arts college lost its Far Eastern historian and could not replace him until many years later. Its decade-old approval plan kept a small number of books in Far Eastern history coming in steadily; the new historian, when he first came to the library, was surprised and delighted with the collection in his field. This was one faculty member who did not mistrust or scorn the library’s ability to build a good collection. Overemphasis on faculty orders-and still more, a situation of faculty control over book expenditures-can lead to great distortions in the library’s satisfying its three primary missions: (1) supporting the curriculum; (2) supporting faculty research and honoring faculty orders; and (3) honoring student suggestions and promoting what Lyle calls “extracurricular reading”, i.e., independent intellectual work by the student body. This third function is particularly important to the liberal arts college library which, to my mind, has the responsibility of furthering the spirit of independent critical inquiry. If the library is to bibliographies
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L. HUNTER
KEVIL
assist fully in the student’s discovery of and coming to grips with what Mark Van Doren calls “‘the great tradition,” 151 its collection must reflect more than the accretion of each year’s worth of faculty requests and course reserve books. Political expediency may suggest that the best policy is to honor all faculty requests, no matter what effect they may have on the collection as a whole, and let all sleeping dogs lie. This policy, however, is not recommendable. I would recommend that the library set about educating the faculty as to the true nature of library collection development, and approval plans in particular. A good place to start would be to disabuse the surprisingly large number of faculty who subscribe to all the myths expressed in mock horror by a speaker at last year’s conference: To many faculty. [approval plans] are the most insidious schemes devised. Not only is book selection not done by subject area faculty but, it is not even done by local librarians. Books are selected instead by strange people or-horrors!+even computers. We, the faculty, have no choice about what books to buy. They just arrive, and the institution pays. Approval plans are schemes designed by librarians to frustrate the faculty and get librarians out of work. [61
The fifth argument, to return to Lyle’s and Santos’ objections, is that approval plans take too much time for administration and book selection. Experience shows that agonized selection is poor selection; most books are obvious accepts or rejects and can be disposed of in just a few minutes at most. This hardly amounts to excessive time. Assume this hypothetical but not unrealistic example: the average book requires five minutes of selector time. With a book budget of $54,000 and an average price of $25 per book, 2160 books will be selected and 240 rejected, assuming a return rate of 10%. In all, 2400 books will have been reviewed at I / 12 hour each, a total of 200 hours orjust l/ 10 of a full-time professional position. It is harder to quantify the amount of time required to administer an approval plan. Starting up the plan and relining the profile so it becomes a good translation of the collection needs can take a fair amount of time at first, particularly if the library has not yet articulated a collection development policy. After the profile has been set up, the annual or semiannual profile reviews to make adjustment for changes in the institution and perhaps also in publishing patterns require very little time. The sixth point is that the college’s return rate will be too high, which is another way of saying that the library will be swamped by many more books than it can afford or even process. There may have been truth to this in the old days, but for many years now all approval vendors have had the ability to pare down automatic shipments to approximate the quantities desired. This is a very important component of what is known as “profile refinement.” The last objection is Santos’ view that with book in hand the selector will be tempted to buy more from impulse rather than need, but will not be so tempted when ordering from bibliographies. This reasoning is paralogistic. What Santos characterizes as impulsive selection is really just a reflection of the fact that inspection of a book often reveals good reasons for buying it that will not be apparent from a bibliographic citation. Similarly, when you order only from short citations, you will miss many reasons for not buying books. There is one final objection. It concerns “the impossibility of constructing perfect and workable profiles,” i.e., the inability to carry profile refinement to a sufficiently line level of detail: . . . it would take a Byzantine flowchart or Rube Goldberg to construct a profile that would instruct a dealer to send us, for example, A Diachronic History of the French Language, but not to send us A Study of rhe Enclitic Particle in French Liferarure From 1560 to 1563. [7] There should be no quarrel with the contention that the perfect profile does not exist-this is of course what makes library selection and the return privilege so important. I do maintain,
The Approval
Plan of Smaller Scope
19
however, that refinement of the profile into the highest level of detail should be done only when necessary. The less complex the profile the better; the simpler profile will convey more information to the library and thus help lower its informational costs. To the authors of the Byzantine example just quoted I would ask: let us assume that the approval profile could not discriminate between the two titles (this is a very generous assumption, since even the most primitive profiling mechanism will be able to discriminate between works in French literature and in French language); but could your collection development policy? And if it could, how do you know that your library needs one title and not the other? You may know that a particular scholar or student prefers one book to the other, but that kind of preference has no place in a collection development policy, nor in the approval profile. The desired title should be firm ordered or ordered on approval, and the collection development policy and approval profile not cluttered with statements of personal preference. *** What are some good ways to start up and nurture a budding approval program to give it the best chances for success? Proper conceptualization of what the approval profiling mechanism can and cannot do is of crucial importance. Those who draw up the profile should have a very clear and distinct idea of what the approval plan is to do, and should communicate this to all concerned, within and without the library. An approval program is not a panacea and cannot answer all a library’s collection needs. But to the extent that the needs to be addressed by the approval arrangement are clear-cut and well understood, the library will enjoy a higher probability of early success. (And the simpler the profile can be in satisfying these needs, the more positive the information conveyed will be-to the benefit of all.) One should take care to position the profile carefully with respect to three fundamental axes: (1) the publisher/subject axis, (2) the core/ nice-to-get axis, and (3) the book/notification slip axis. Concerning the first axis, most approval profiling mechanisms permit preselection of material based on publisher, subject, or publisher and subject combined. A publisher approach would, for example, send to a library all new titles by Oxford University Press. This amounts to using the approval plan as a substitute for a blanket order with the publisher (frequently at lower cost). A subject approach appropriate to a college would be, for instance, general books in history, philosophy, and the other liberal arts and sciences at the undergraduate level. A college in a revitalized downtown area, particularly one with architecture in its curriculum, might add the specialized subject of architectural preservation. These two approaches, publisher and subject, could be combined to form a third: for example, all undergraduate-level books in mathematics from Springer-Verlag. A university press plan could be considered a variation of the publisher approach. A library’s choosing to emphasize the publisher or the subject approach will have implications for the quality and quantity of approval receipts, for the kind of information conveyed by the plan, and thus for the work flow through the acquisitions and collection development departments. In general, a publisher approach simplifies acquisition routines (by permitting easy disposition of firm-order requests simply on the basis of the publisher), while a subject approach simplifies the task of collection development. The second axis, core/nice-to-get, refers to the essential and nonessential needs of the library. The library’s essential or core requirements should be satisfied through the approval plan (or standing orders) whenever possible. All Brookings publications or all Wiley books in business and economics are examples of possible core requirements, the “hard core” as it were, the books easily selected. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the nice-to-gets, the more arcane books of which the library can only afford or justify buying one in a hundred (though all 100 may be excellent
20
L. HUNTER
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pieces of schoiarship): the histories of Chinese alchemy, the critical treatments of Norwegian Symbolism, or even the books on French philology that give our colleagues at Virginia such problems. In between is the “soft core,” those areas where the library has a definite but not comprehensive interest. For example, of ten new books on the American Revolution, the library may definitely want some number between three and eight, depending on the books themselves and how many of the ten are supplied automatically. Agile construction of the subject, nonsubject, and publisher components of the profile can be used to handle the soft core, though a simple and common approach is to profile the hard core for automatic book shipments, the nice-to-get for notification slips, and the soft core for a combination of books and slips. The last axis, automatic book/notification slip, reflects in large measure the preference of different individuals for selecting from actual books or from pieces of paper. Profiling for a substantial number of notification slips will enable the library to meet budgetary goals at year’s end. Slip orders can be scaled down or halted if money is tight, or if more money is available, slips passed over earlier can now be ordered. It is recommended that the college library considering an approval plan think long and hard about where to situate each of its constituencies, the library and academic departments, along each of three axes or continuums. In theory it is of course undesirable to write into the approval profile, which is after all simply the translation of the library’s collection development policy, the preferences or needs of individual researchers or library selectors, but it may make excellent practical sense to do so on occasion, politics and human nature being what they are. *** To conclude, here is the earliest instance of a college approval plan we are aware of. According to the 1884-85 catalogue of Albion College in Albion, Michigan, the college library had . . an arrangement with Phillips & Hunt, whereby we are to receive for examination monthly books in variousdepa~ments, thus enabling us to keep up with thevery best thought. ISI
installments
of the newest
If an approval plan could work well for a liberal arts college in 1884, despite all the obstacles faced by academic librarians of the time, there can be no doubt that approval plans can work equally well, if not better, for the college librarians of today.
REFERENCES I. Systems and Procedures Exchange Center, Association of Research Libraries, Office of Management Studies, W~hin~on, D.C., April 1982, ISSNOIt%-3574. 2. Lyle, Guy R. me A~mi~istrutio~ ofrhp Caifege Library. 4th cd. New York: Wilson, 1974, pp. 189- 190. 3. Santos, R. “Materials Selection at a Small College Library,” W Special Report #ll. Collection Management. New York: Bowker, 1979, p. 13. 4. Lyle, op. cit., pi 179. 5. Van Doren, Mark. UberalEducution. Boston: Beacon Press, 1959. Relations in Acquisitions and Collection Development: The Faculty 6. Dukes, Robert J., Jr. “Faculty/Library Perspective,” Library Acquhitions: practice % 7%eory, 7:3 (1983). p. 223. 7. “Proposal to Reduce Approval Order Plans,” SPEC Kit 83, Approval Plans in ARL Libraries. University of Virginia Library, November 3,1975. 8. GiIdart, Robert. Albion Cofjege, f835-1960: A History. Albion, MI: The College, 1961, pp. 133-34, cited by John Caldwell, “Perceptions of the Academic Library,” an unpublish~ paper presented at the 1984 ACRL Conference in Seattle, WA.
0364-6408/85
Theory, Vbl. 9, pp. 13-20.1985
Copyright
Printed in the USA. All rights reserved.
ISSUESINBOOKANDSERIAL
THE APPROVAL
Q 1985 Pergamon
$03.00+.00
Press Ltd
ACQUISITIONS
PLAN OF SMALLER
SCOPE
L. HUNTER KEVIL
Technical Programs
Representative
Raker &Taylor
Co.
6 Kirby Avenue Somerville. NJ 08876
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the topic of small academic libraries and approval plans. The principal area of concern will be the liberal arts college, but everything said will be generalizable to most small- and medium-sized academic libraries. There are two premises fundamental to this paper. The first is that approval programs are underutilized by academic libraries generally, and by college libraries in particular. This strong correlation between the size of a library and the likelihood it will use an approval plan is rather perverse, since making full use of the services provided by an approval vendor is a very important way a small library can overcome some of the many disadvantages of its small scale. It is ironic that those who have most to gain from an approval plan use it least. The second premise is that while existing approval plans are not perfect and many college libraries have experienced various obstacles in starting up a plan, the root difficulty underlying the low incidence of approval use stems from imperfect perceptions of what an approval plan can and cannot actually do, from lack of knowledge of how to make the plan work and derive maximum benefit from it. This paper will be structured so that after some definitional preliminaries, the most commonly expressed arguments for not using an approval plan in a college library will be cited, discussed, and refuted when necessary. Next will be discussed some of the myths and misconceptions of selecting books for a college library (particularly when faculty do the selecting); the paper will conclude with some suggestions for successfully conceptualizing and then setting up an approval program in a college environment. *** Common terminology notwithstanding, there should be a clear-cut distinction between an approval plan in the proper sense of the term on the one hand, and the multitudinous blanket or standing order arrangements, or gathering plans, on the other. While all provide for the automatic shipment of books, the approval plan is clearly different in that it is far more sophisticated because it is intended to solve a number of problems peculiar to academic and 13
14
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KEVIL
research libraries. The term “approval” may be responsible for some confusion. Returnability is a nice feature of current plans, but it is not of prime importance. SPEC Kit 83, Approval Plans in ARL Libraries [II identified over 200 approval vendors, including Amnesty International Canada, Tower Records, and the State Department of the U.S.S.R. The definition of “approval” that produced this list is implausibly broad, perhaps because it laid too much emphasis on returnability. The term “approvaf,” with its possible associations of receiving on approval postage stamps from stamp dealers, is doubtless responsible for much of the confusion. But the term is now standard, and we will have to live with it. Let us now define, for the purposes of this paper, exactly what constitutes an approval plan. Here are two definitions, the first centering on the operational point of view, and the second on that of collection development.
De~~iti~n 1. An approval plan is a sophisticated armngement between an academic or research library and a vendor, whereby: (1) the vendor selects for approval treatment all new titles in a well-defined area, and profiles those selected as to subject and formal characteristics; (2) the library draws up a “profile” of subject, nonsubject or formal, publisher, and series decisions reflecting its collection development policy; and (3) the vendor matches each new title against the library’s profile and sends automatically on approval all positive matches.
De~nitjun 2. An approval plan is a means of collecting a well-de~ned selection of current imprints and is used by libraries conceiving their collection development responsibilities, not in title-by-title terms, but in terms ofcovering publishing output. In simpler language, there should be a pipeline with a set of filters, the pipeline to bring into consideration all new books, and filters to block shipment of those books the library has decided it does not want to consider for acquisition. The system of pipeline and filters should be constructed so that a good translation of the collection-development policy into a good approval profile is possible. The best way to define an approval plan is to focus on the goals, rather than on what is done to achieve them. Thus any arrangement satisfying these three goals could legitimately be considered an approval plan: (1) to reduce costs and speed processing in the acquisitions department; (2) to enhance the quality of book selection and simplify the work flow associated with collection development; (3) in particular to reduce the informational costs associated with the library’s acquisitions and collection development activities by means of these vendor. functions: (a) by performing preselection in a wellde~ned, predictabIe, consistent manner (usually this involves “running” the library’s profile against this week’s batch of new titles); (b) by not capriciously withholding titles from approval treatment (i.e., by defining a comprehensible section of world monographic output and rigorously treating for approval all new titles). This requires the vendor to perform publisher contact and bibliographic searching functions; (c) by supplying bibliographic slips and ensuring that the bibliographic data are up to the highest professional standards, This requires the vendor to perform many of the functions of a technical services department; (d) by making available to the library reports of approval activity suitable for management purposes.
The Approval
Plan of Smaller Scope
15
Notice that returnability does not necessarily follow from these goals, although in practice it is always available. The requirement that an approval program should reduce a library’s informational costs significantly is central to the concept of approval, though it has not been mentioned directly in the literature. The full benefits of an approval plan will not be realized without such a reductionthat is, the library will duplicate on its own much effort already expended by the vendor, or easily supplied by it. Realization of these benefits is particularly important for academic libraries, which are responsible for covering a much broader proportion of the world’s monographic output than are public and special libraries. By this definition of approval programs, there exist scarcelv more than half a dozen vendors, not the 200 or so identified in the ARL SPEC Kit cited. *** The literature dealing with the college library has not been kind to approval plans. Let me cite two exponents of the case against them in the college library and, while discussing their reasoning, give the case for them. The first exponent is Guy Lyle in his well-known Administration of the College Library: While there has been a definite trend toward adopting approval gathering plans by university libraries, college librarians have refrained for both financial and bibliographical reasons. Financially the college library has very little free money after paying for fixed charges such as serials, continuations, and binding; secondly, the financial outlook of the college library since the beginning of the seventies has been too uncertain and unstable to make any additional commitments. Bibliographically college librarians for the most part resent the idea of vendors and publishers doing their selection for them. The college librarian is apt to think that he can do this better for himself, with the help of his faculty colleagues. In the midst of specialists, he likes to think that he has one specialty even though he is a generalist, and that is bibliography and the ability to select books 121.
The second critic of approval programs is Bob Santos: Sizable approval plans I believe are counter-productive to small libraries. They take time to administer, to profile, and to select from. Return rates can get high as selection rates by small libraries (sic]. Also, many inappropriate works are chosen because of selection by impulse rather than from need. I would recommend the placement of standing orders to many of the tine series that are available, though. Certainly, one other medium to utilize is the classic one-the bibliography 131.
The arguments boil down to these: (1) College libraries haven’t enough money to support an approval plan. (2) Committing oneself to an approval plan in a period of unstable budgets is imprudent. (3) The library should not let a vendor perform its selection for it. (4) Selection can be done best by the generalist librarian, with assistance from the faculty. (5) Approval programs take too much time to administer. (6) The return rates will be unacceptably high. (7) Having the book in hand can result in poor selection (“selection by impulse rather than from need”). (8) Book acquisition by standing order and from perusal of bibliographies is superior. While some of these arguments have me *it(and some do not), there is a “flip” or positive side to each. Lyle’s generalization that college libraries do not have a sufficiently large enough book budget to support an approval plan cannot be applied to all colleges. Most vendors use a figure of $50,000 as a rule of thumb; generally a library with a budget for current imprints of this magnitude or greater can make an approval arrangement work. There are, of course, exceptions: libraries with smaller budgets and a successful approval plan of long standing, and libraries with
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much larger budgets in which the approval concept never took root. The variables here are the library’s desire to have an approval plan, and the ability to make the physical and conceptual adjustments necessary to accommodate the new approval arrangements into an existing system of work flows and multiple constituencies. Lyle’s second point is that a library’s committing to an approval plan in a period of budget uncertainty is imprudent. But there is no need for the library to commit itself this way. Even the libraries required to use contracts have escape clauses. There is no vendor with the desire-or the legal power-to compel a library to accept books. Indeed, during the period of financial uncertainty of the seventies, approval vendors become quite adept at stopping approval shipments on an instant’s notice. Usually the library will be supplied with notification slips or forms in lieu of automatic books until the beginning of the new fiscal year, or the “unfreezing” of the book budget. There is no risk to the library in this, and picking up the pieces and starting up afresh is readily accomplished. There may even be an advantage in having an approval plan, if the college administration can be persuaded that the plan is a continuing obligation-like the periodicals budget -and should not be cancelled, even temporarily. This has been successful in a few instances. Another consideration is that a scholarly book can usually be bought at a lower price on approval than as a firm order. This is an important consideration if a college library wants to stretch its small book allocation and acquire as many books as possible. Lyle’s third point brings up the old but very persistent myth that a library with an approval program lets a vendor do its selection for it. This is simply untrue. The job the vendor wants to do is preselection, not the actual selection, which is done at the library. This preselection is accomplished by the library’s profile which, of course, is a record of its collection development policy. To the extent that this record is accurate, preselection will simply exclude those titles library policy would have excluded (textbooks or books not in English, for example), and will send for consideration those titles the library has determined its selectors should see. Selection can then be done at the library in the best way, with book in hand. Don’t be confused by the similarity in terminology: preselection is not selection; it is, simply, the application of a “Clter” to exclude what the library knows it does not want. Preselection enhances library selection by giving information about what will not be shipped to it, thus permitting a more concentrated attention to the books in hand. This leads to Lyle’s fourth argument and Santos’ last one: book acquisition is best done by standing orders and by firm orders generated through the bibliographic skills of the generalist librarian, with faculty help. By bibliographic skills, I assume Lyle and Santos are referring to consultation of national bibliographies, book reviews, lists of books received in the best journals, the limes Literary Supplement, even the bibliographies and references in the best new books in a discipline-all the tricks of the trade of the subject bibliographer in a major research library. There is much to criticize in this point of view, even by a committed generalist librarian. Placing standing orders by series can be very worthwhile, but this involves committing the library budget for new titles sight unseen, and in effect assigning one’s selection responsibilities over to the editors at the publishing houses. It would be inconsistent to criticize approval plans for these reasons and at the same time to exempt standing orders from criticism. The preference for firm orders placed by the generalist college librarian, with faculty input, is more interesting and difficult. How can a college librarian, who is responsible for covering all academic fields except some of the professional and vocational ones restricted to graduate or community-college programs, successfully measure up to Lyle’s ideal? What college library can afford a good selection of national bibliographies or a representative selection of journals in all the disciplines taught? What college librarian will have the time to read the best reviews and
The Approval Plan of Smaller Scope
17
in the best new books, generate orders from them in the right balance, and fit all this in with the on-going process of satisfying faculty requests? Let me put my objection another way: while the college librarian may generate as few as 1/ 10 or 1/ 20 the quantity of firm orders as the bibliographer at a research library, he or she still must perform nearly as much bibliographic research as the research-library bibliographers, if the goal is to make the best possible selection and not create gaps in the collection. In other words, selection, to be fully effective and rational, must take place with reference to the totality of possible choices, not just a haphazard sample. College librarians, despite the expectations of some patrons, do not possess superhuman bibliographic skills. Most research libraries find the collection development argument for using approval plans compelling. These arguments are just as compelling for the college library, with its very limited bibliographic resources and still more limited staffing. Lyle admits that “the college library simply does not have staff funds” 141for full- or even part-time subject specialists and selectors. Why not, then, let the vendor do as much bibliographic work for it as possible, perform a preselection based on its stated needs, and then send it automatic books in the right quantity for each subject so the college librarian can make the final decision to keep or reject with book in hand? Lyle might object that with good faculty help he can make his system work-agreed. The real question is which kind of arrangement can more easily or more positively be made to work. We can doubt that the kind of faculty cooperation Lyle needs will ever be more than a rare, welcome exception. There are, however, problems even with a cooperative faculty. For example, the faculty representatives may be out of town during the summer or on sabbatical leave. There can be long periods of time before the previous representative is replaced by the new one. All of this can create gaps, either because titles are missed, or because books ordered too late after publication are unavailable. It is very difficult for the scholar who is a specialist to avoid selecting too much material in his or her area of expertise. There is another danger in faculty selection. The professional work of a faculty member is premised on the existence of a qualitative hierarchy, the fact that a piece of scholarship will eventually be ranked on the sale of “good/ indifferent/ bad.” Teachers (and the rest of us) will tend to buy for our personal libraries only the best books. But selection for a library based on this kind of qualitative hierarchy will not be fully successful-not only because notions of what the best books are will be very different, but also because the library should represent a balanced selection of points of view and, indeed, because the library should buy even “bad” books, when they are important, influential, or otherwise useful. These difficulties are compounded when the faculty are uncooperative (e.g., they won’t send over many orders, but still will not delegate purchasing authority to the library). The virtue of an approval program is that at least a modicum of collection balance can be assured, irrespective of whether faculty are available to review the approval books or to send in firm orders. A liberal arts college lost its Far Eastern historian and could not replace him until many years later. Its decade-old approval plan kept a small number of books in Far Eastern history coming in steadily; the new historian, when he first came to the library, was surprised and delighted with the collection in his field. This was one faculty member who did not mistrust or scorn the library’s ability to build a good collection. Overemphasis on faculty orders-and still more, a situation of faculty control over book expenditures-can lead to great distortions in the library’s satisfying its three primary missions: (1) supporting the curriculum; (2) supporting faculty research and honoring faculty orders; and (3) honoring student suggestions and promoting what Lyle calls “extracurricular reading”, i.e., independent intellectual work by the student body. This third function is particularly important to the liberal arts college library which, to my mind, has the responsibility of furthering the spirit of independent critical inquiry. If the library is to bibliographies
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assist fully in the student’s discovery of and coming to grips with what Mark Van Doren calls “‘the great tradition,” 151 its collection must reflect more than the accretion of each year’s worth of faculty requests and course reserve books. Political expediency may suggest that the best policy is to honor all faculty requests, no matter what effect they may have on the collection as a whole, and let all sleeping dogs lie. This policy, however, is not recommendable. I would recommend that the library set about educating the faculty as to the true nature of library collection development, and approval plans in particular. A good place to start would be to disabuse the surprisingly large number of faculty who subscribe to all the myths expressed in mock horror by a speaker at last year’s conference: To many faculty. [approval plans] are the most insidious schemes devised. Not only is book selection not done by subject area faculty but, it is not even done by local librarians. Books are selected instead by strange people or-horrors!+even computers. We, the faculty, have no choice about what books to buy. They just arrive, and the institution pays. Approval plans are schemes designed by librarians to frustrate the faculty and get librarians out of work. [61
The fifth argument, to return to Lyle’s and Santos’ objections, is that approval plans take too much time for administration and book selection. Experience shows that agonized selection is poor selection; most books are obvious accepts or rejects and can be disposed of in just a few minutes at most. This hardly amounts to excessive time. Assume this hypothetical but not unrealistic example: the average book requires five minutes of selector time. With a book budget of $54,000 and an average price of $25 per book, 2160 books will be selected and 240 rejected, assuming a return rate of 10%. In all, 2400 books will have been reviewed at I / 12 hour each, a total of 200 hours orjust l/ 10 of a full-time professional position. It is harder to quantify the amount of time required to administer an approval plan. Starting up the plan and relining the profile so it becomes a good translation of the collection needs can take a fair amount of time at first, particularly if the library has not yet articulated a collection development policy. After the profile has been set up, the annual or semiannual profile reviews to make adjustment for changes in the institution and perhaps also in publishing patterns require very little time. The sixth point is that the college’s return rate will be too high, which is another way of saying that the library will be swamped by many more books than it can afford or even process. There may have been truth to this in the old days, but for many years now all approval vendors have had the ability to pare down automatic shipments to approximate the quantities desired. This is a very important component of what is known as “profile refinement.” The last objection is Santos’ view that with book in hand the selector will be tempted to buy more from impulse rather than need, but will not be so tempted when ordering from bibliographies. This reasoning is paralogistic. What Santos characterizes as impulsive selection is really just a reflection of the fact that inspection of a book often reveals good reasons for buying it that will not be apparent from a bibliographic citation. Similarly, when you order only from short citations, you will miss many reasons for not buying books. There is one final objection. It concerns “the impossibility of constructing perfect and workable profiles,” i.e., the inability to carry profile refinement to a sufficiently line level of detail: . . . it would take a Byzantine flowchart or Rube Goldberg to construct a profile that would instruct a dealer to send us, for example, A Diachronic History of the French Language, but not to send us A Study of rhe Enclitic Particle in French Liferarure From 1560 to 1563. [7] There should be no quarrel with the contention that the perfect profile does not exist-this is of course what makes library selection and the return privilege so important. I do maintain,
The Approval
Plan of Smaller Scope
19
however, that refinement of the profile into the highest level of detail should be done only when necessary. The less complex the profile the better; the simpler profile will convey more information to the library and thus help lower its informational costs. To the authors of the Byzantine example just quoted I would ask: let us assume that the approval profile could not discriminate between the two titles (this is a very generous assumption, since even the most primitive profiling mechanism will be able to discriminate between works in French literature and in French language); but could your collection development policy? And if it could, how do you know that your library needs one title and not the other? You may know that a particular scholar or student prefers one book to the other, but that kind of preference has no place in a collection development policy, nor in the approval profile. The desired title should be firm ordered or ordered on approval, and the collection development policy and approval profile not cluttered with statements of personal preference. *** What are some good ways to start up and nurture a budding approval program to give it the best chances for success? Proper conceptualization of what the approval profiling mechanism can and cannot do is of crucial importance. Those who draw up the profile should have a very clear and distinct idea of what the approval plan is to do, and should communicate this to all concerned, within and without the library. An approval program is not a panacea and cannot answer all a library’s collection needs. But to the extent that the needs to be addressed by the approval arrangement are clear-cut and well understood, the library will enjoy a higher probability of early success. (And the simpler the profile can be in satisfying these needs, the more positive the information conveyed will be-to the benefit of all.) One should take care to position the profile carefully with respect to three fundamental axes: (1) the publisher/subject axis, (2) the core/ nice-to-get axis, and (3) the book/notification slip axis. Concerning the first axis, most approval profiling mechanisms permit preselection of material based on publisher, subject, or publisher and subject combined. A publisher approach would, for example, send to a library all new titles by Oxford University Press. This amounts to using the approval plan as a substitute for a blanket order with the publisher (frequently at lower cost). A subject approach appropriate to a college would be, for instance, general books in history, philosophy, and the other liberal arts and sciences at the undergraduate level. A college in a revitalized downtown area, particularly one with architecture in its curriculum, might add the specialized subject of architectural preservation. These two approaches, publisher and subject, could be combined to form a third: for example, all undergraduate-level books in mathematics from Springer-Verlag. A university press plan could be considered a variation of the publisher approach. A library’s choosing to emphasize the publisher or the subject approach will have implications for the quality and quantity of approval receipts, for the kind of information conveyed by the plan, and thus for the work flow through the acquisitions and collection development departments. In general, a publisher approach simplifies acquisition routines (by permitting easy disposition of firm-order requests simply on the basis of the publisher), while a subject approach simplifies the task of collection development. The second axis, core/nice-to-get, refers to the essential and nonessential needs of the library. The library’s essential or core requirements should be satisfied through the approval plan (or standing orders) whenever possible. All Brookings publications or all Wiley books in business and economics are examples of possible core requirements, the “hard core” as it were, the books easily selected. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the nice-to-gets, the more arcane books of which the library can only afford or justify buying one in a hundred (though all 100 may be excellent
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L. HUNTER
KEVIL
pieces of schoiarship): the histories of Chinese alchemy, the critical treatments of Norwegian Symbolism, or even the books on French philology that give our colleagues at Virginia such problems. In between is the “soft core,” those areas where the library has a definite but not comprehensive interest. For example, of ten new books on the American Revolution, the library may definitely want some number between three and eight, depending on the books themselves and how many of the ten are supplied automatically. Agile construction of the subject, nonsubject, and publisher components of the profile can be used to handle the soft core, though a simple and common approach is to profile the hard core for automatic book shipments, the nice-to-get for notification slips, and the soft core for a combination of books and slips. The last axis, automatic book/notification slip, reflects in large measure the preference of different individuals for selecting from actual books or from pieces of paper. Profiling for a substantial number of notification slips will enable the library to meet budgetary goals at year’s end. Slip orders can be scaled down or halted if money is tight, or if more money is available, slips passed over earlier can now be ordered. It is recommended that the college library considering an approval plan think long and hard about where to situate each of its constituencies, the library and academic departments, along each of three axes or continuums. In theory it is of course undesirable to write into the approval profile, which is after all simply the translation of the library’s collection development policy, the preferences or needs of individual researchers or library selectors, but it may make excellent practical sense to do so on occasion, politics and human nature being what they are. *** To conclude, here is the earliest instance of a college approval plan we are aware of. According to the 1884-85 catalogue of Albion College in Albion, Michigan, the college library had . . an arrangement with Phillips & Hunt, whereby we are to receive for examination monthly books in variousdepa~ments, thus enabling us to keep up with thevery best thought. ISI
installments
of the newest
If an approval plan could work well for a liberal arts college in 1884, despite all the obstacles faced by academic librarians of the time, there can be no doubt that approval plans can work equally well, if not better, for the college librarians of today.
REFERENCES I. Systems and Procedures Exchange Center, Association of Research Libraries, Office of Management Studies, W~hin~on, D.C., April 1982, ISSNOIt%-3574. 2. Lyle, Guy R. me A~mi~istrutio~ ofrhp Caifege Library. 4th cd. New York: Wilson, 1974, pp. 189- 190. 3. Santos, R. “Materials Selection at a Small College Library,” W Special Report #ll. Collection Management. New York: Bowker, 1979, p. 13. 4. Lyle, op. cit., pi 179. 5. Van Doren, Mark. UberalEducution. Boston: Beacon Press, 1959. Relations in Acquisitions and Collection Development: The Faculty 6. Dukes, Robert J., Jr. “Faculty/Library Perspective,” Library Acquhitions: practice % 7%eory, 7:3 (1983). p. 223. 7. “Proposal to Reduce Approval Order Plans,” SPEC Kit 83, Approval Plans in ARL Libraries. University of Virginia Library, November 3,1975. 8. GiIdart, Robert. Albion Cofjege, f835-1960: A History. Albion, MI: The College, 1961, pp. 133-34, cited by John Caldwell, “Perceptions of the Academic Library,” an unpublish~ paper presented at the 1984 ACRL Conference in Seattle, WA.