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Approval plan rejects—to keep or not to keep—is that the question?
Librory Acquisitions: Practice & Theory, Vol. 16, pp. 167-169, 1992 Printed in the USA. All rights reserved.
CONFERENCE
0364-6408/92 $5.00 + .OO
Copyright0 1992Pergamon Press Ltd.
REPORTS
APPROVAL PLAN REJECTS-TO KEEP OR NOT TO KEEP-IS THAT THE QUESTION?
JOHN EARL KEETH University Librarian and Department Head Acquisitions Department University of South Florida Library 4202 Fowler Avenue Tampa, FL 33620-4500
“The University of South Florida, founded on December 18, 1956, was the first state university in the United States planned and built in the twentieth century and also the first state university in Florida located purposely in a major metropolitan center” [l]. Since its founding, the university has grown to over 30,000 students and, in addition to its main campus located in Tampa, now also has campuses in St. Petersburg, Sarasota, Fort Myers, and Lakeland. Officially, the NOTIS online catalog was made available to the public in September 1987. NOTIS Acquisitions was implemented in July 1987. The University of South Florida (USF) libraries are divided into five processing units in NOTIS, but only the two that include the Tampa campus units are discussed in this paper. As soon as it was known that the USF Library was going on NOTIS, there was no question that one of the first changes within the department would be that, with the exception of the invoice file, manual files would no longer be maintained. This has not been totally achieved, but we are very close. The following records or files are now maintained online rather than manually.
Orders Better known as O/P/R (Order/Payment/Receipt) records, I usually refer to this record as the acquisitions record. No manual on-order file is maintained. The original brochures or order requests that are submitted are kept, but these are simply placed in a file cabinet according to order date with no attempt to organize them in any other way. They are kept for approximately a year and then discarded. Occasionally there has been a need to locate the original order request. For filled orders the receipt and payment information is recorded neatly in the acquisitions record. No separate manual payment slip file is maintained. At this time there are no plans to move this information to offline files. 167
168
J. E. KEETH
Canceled/unfilled orders All orders that have been canceled by either the vendor or the acquisitions department are maintained online. If there are no other copy holdings statements attached to the bibliographic record, a canceled title will display to the public with the following message: “this record is for an item that is missing or not owned by the library.” If there is one or more additional copy holdings statements attached to the bibliographic record, this particular copy will be suppressed from the public.
Withdrawn items All withdrawn titles are maintained online by the catalog department. What displays to the public is the same as what was outlined above for canceled items. This is particularly helpful to the acquisitions department staff when working with gift books. Overall, the response from the user, be it faculty, staff, or student, in having titles that are on order display in the public catalog has been very positive. Canceled and withdrawn items displaying to the public have been a somewhat different matter. Originally, the message that displayed for these items was “this record is for staff use only.” Interestingly enough, although library staff thought this message was clear, the public completely misread it and was convinced that the library had restricted these titles for staff use only. Once the public display message was changed to its current wording, this ceased to be a major problem. The public still often asks about it, but they at least seem to understand what it means.
Approval plan rejects The USF Library has a comprehensive approval plan for its Tampa campus library and a less comprehensive one for its St. Petersburg campus library. The approval vendors for the Tampa campus library supply stripped-down bibliographic records on diskette for each title supplied on approval. These records are downloaded into the online catalog and display to the public as being on order. Approval titles rejected by the reviewer are handled the same way as a canceled order. That is, the record is maintained in the online catalog after the item is returned. Again, what displays to the public depends on whether there is one or more copy holding statements attached to the record. Why are approval rejects retained online? There are several reasons. First, it is a very quick and efficient way to document what was supplied by the approval vendor and returned. About the time USF was preparing to implement NOTIS, there was a certain amount of unhappiness among some of the faculty concerning the approval plans. There was a relatively small but very vocal group who felt the plans were not supplying their needs. Many times the vendor was being blamed for not having supplied the title when, in fact, it had been supplied on approval and rejected. Second, hopefully, it provides useful feedback to the collection development librarians. The name of the reviewer(s) who rejected the title and the reason it was rejected are recorded in the acquisitions record. When requests are received for titles previously rejected on approval, there is some reference point for the collection development librarian to reassess the order. Interestingly enough, the initial reaction of the collection development librarians was negative in that they perceived it as an effort by the library administration to monitor how well they were doing their job. This was not the intent, although one might become somewhat concerned if one sees that he or she has been rejecting a seemingly high number of titles that the faculty later request.
Approval
Plan Rejects
169
Certainly there has been some negative reaction from the public. USF policy as a rule has been to downplay to the general public the fact that a title was an approval reject. The library staff does not suppress the fact that a title was an approval reject. However, they do not reveal the name of the patron who rejected it or the reason for the rejection. There have been a few incidents where a patron was extremely upset that a book he or she wanted had been rejected and returned. The patron is told that he or she may request that it be considered for purchase. The third reason for leaving the bibliographic record for approval rejects in the online catalog is that it may be used later for one of the other libraries. During the writing of this paper a quick review of 100 approval titles rejected by the Tampa campus library during the early part of the 1987/1988 fiscal year was done. Although these results are by no means scientific, of these 100 titles, 22% had either been accepted through the St. Petersburg campus approval plan or ordered for one of the other libraries. Four percent of the titles rejected through the Tampa campus approval plan were also rejected through the St. Petersburg approval plan. Four percent of the titles rejected through the Tampa campus approval plan were later reordered by the Tampa campus library. There are those who would argue that the time spent on rejected titles could be better used in other activities. For USF that is not a valid argument. The bibliographic record is already in the system through the diskette load, and in NOTIS the time it takes to create an acquisitions record is relatively minimal. It takes about as much time to have a record deleted as it does to create the acquisitions record. Thus, there is no real time savings. Also, if the above statistics hold true over a longer period of time, a fairly large percentage of these bibliographic records are used again. It should be made clear, however, that the intent is not to retain bibliographic records for approval rejects in the system forever. If the only copy holding statement attached to the bibliographic record is the one for the approval reject, the record is given an action date of three years in the future. In three years when the record appears on an action list, it will be reviewed, and, if no other copy holdings have been attached to it, the record will be deleted. It may be decided later to leave these records in longer than three years. It should also be stated that this same procedure is followed for canceled orders. I would just like to say in closing that if you have manual files with information useful to you in performing your normal duties, put them into the online file. Be creative! As far as I am concerned, it makes no sense to do otherwise. Index redesign in NOTIS, which will allow bibliographic records to display only in the technical services mode will certainly remove much of the criticism for having these files in the online system [2].
NOTES 1. University of South Florida. Fuculty/Stuff Handbook. Tampa, FL: University of South Florida, 1986, 7. 2. Since this talk was presented, the USF Library has implemented NOTIS 4.6 which allows bibliographic records to be suppressed from displaying in the online catalog. Also, at the request of the Catalog Department, we began a six-month test project in January 1991, where, instead of loading the diskette records, cataloging staff began to download bibliographic records from OCLC into our database as soon as the approval shipments were received. This project will be used to determine if time could be saved by not having to overlay the diskette records at the time the books are cataloged.
CONFERENCE
0364-6408/92 $5.00 + .OO
Copyright0 1992Pergamon Press Ltd.
REPORTS
APPROVAL PLAN REJECTS-TO KEEP OR NOT TO KEEP-IS THAT THE QUESTION?
JOHN EARL KEETH University Librarian and Department Head Acquisitions Department University of South Florida Library 4202 Fowler Avenue Tampa, FL 33620-4500
“The University of South Florida, founded on December 18, 1956, was the first state university in the United States planned and built in the twentieth century and also the first state university in Florida located purposely in a major metropolitan center” [l]. Since its founding, the university has grown to over 30,000 students and, in addition to its main campus located in Tampa, now also has campuses in St. Petersburg, Sarasota, Fort Myers, and Lakeland. Officially, the NOTIS online catalog was made available to the public in September 1987. NOTIS Acquisitions was implemented in July 1987. The University of South Florida (USF) libraries are divided into five processing units in NOTIS, but only the two that include the Tampa campus units are discussed in this paper. As soon as it was known that the USF Library was going on NOTIS, there was no question that one of the first changes within the department would be that, with the exception of the invoice file, manual files would no longer be maintained. This has not been totally achieved, but we are very close. The following records or files are now maintained online rather than manually.
Orders Better known as O/P/R (Order/Payment/Receipt) records, I usually refer to this record as the acquisitions record. No manual on-order file is maintained. The original brochures or order requests that are submitted are kept, but these are simply placed in a file cabinet according to order date with no attempt to organize them in any other way. They are kept for approximately a year and then discarded. Occasionally there has been a need to locate the original order request. For filled orders the receipt and payment information is recorded neatly in the acquisitions record. No separate manual payment slip file is maintained. At this time there are no plans to move this information to offline files. 167
168
J. E. KEETH
Canceled/unfilled orders All orders that have been canceled by either the vendor or the acquisitions department are maintained online. If there are no other copy holdings statements attached to the bibliographic record, a canceled title will display to the public with the following message: “this record is for an item that is missing or not owned by the library.” If there is one or more additional copy holdings statements attached to the bibliographic record, this particular copy will be suppressed from the public.
Withdrawn items All withdrawn titles are maintained online by the catalog department. What displays to the public is the same as what was outlined above for canceled items. This is particularly helpful to the acquisitions department staff when working with gift books. Overall, the response from the user, be it faculty, staff, or student, in having titles that are on order display in the public catalog has been very positive. Canceled and withdrawn items displaying to the public have been a somewhat different matter. Originally, the message that displayed for these items was “this record is for staff use only.” Interestingly enough, although library staff thought this message was clear, the public completely misread it and was convinced that the library had restricted these titles for staff use only. Once the public display message was changed to its current wording, this ceased to be a major problem. The public still often asks about it, but they at least seem to understand what it means.
Approval plan rejects The USF Library has a comprehensive approval plan for its Tampa campus library and a less comprehensive one for its St. Petersburg campus library. The approval vendors for the Tampa campus library supply stripped-down bibliographic records on diskette for each title supplied on approval. These records are downloaded into the online catalog and display to the public as being on order. Approval titles rejected by the reviewer are handled the same way as a canceled order. That is, the record is maintained in the online catalog after the item is returned. Again, what displays to the public depends on whether there is one or more copy holding statements attached to the record. Why are approval rejects retained online? There are several reasons. First, it is a very quick and efficient way to document what was supplied by the approval vendor and returned. About the time USF was preparing to implement NOTIS, there was a certain amount of unhappiness among some of the faculty concerning the approval plans. There was a relatively small but very vocal group who felt the plans were not supplying their needs. Many times the vendor was being blamed for not having supplied the title when, in fact, it had been supplied on approval and rejected. Second, hopefully, it provides useful feedback to the collection development librarians. The name of the reviewer(s) who rejected the title and the reason it was rejected are recorded in the acquisitions record. When requests are received for titles previously rejected on approval, there is some reference point for the collection development librarian to reassess the order. Interestingly enough, the initial reaction of the collection development librarians was negative in that they perceived it as an effort by the library administration to monitor how well they were doing their job. This was not the intent, although one might become somewhat concerned if one sees that he or she has been rejecting a seemingly high number of titles that the faculty later request.
Approval
Plan Rejects
169
Certainly there has been some negative reaction from the public. USF policy as a rule has been to downplay to the general public the fact that a title was an approval reject. The library staff does not suppress the fact that a title was an approval reject. However, they do not reveal the name of the patron who rejected it or the reason for the rejection. There have been a few incidents where a patron was extremely upset that a book he or she wanted had been rejected and returned. The patron is told that he or she may request that it be considered for purchase. The third reason for leaving the bibliographic record for approval rejects in the online catalog is that it may be used later for one of the other libraries. During the writing of this paper a quick review of 100 approval titles rejected by the Tampa campus library during the early part of the 1987/1988 fiscal year was done. Although these results are by no means scientific, of these 100 titles, 22% had either been accepted through the St. Petersburg campus approval plan or ordered for one of the other libraries. Four percent of the titles rejected through the Tampa campus approval plan were also rejected through the St. Petersburg approval plan. Four percent of the titles rejected through the Tampa campus approval plan were later reordered by the Tampa campus library. There are those who would argue that the time spent on rejected titles could be better used in other activities. For USF that is not a valid argument. The bibliographic record is already in the system through the diskette load, and in NOTIS the time it takes to create an acquisitions record is relatively minimal. It takes about as much time to have a record deleted as it does to create the acquisitions record. Thus, there is no real time savings. Also, if the above statistics hold true over a longer period of time, a fairly large percentage of these bibliographic records are used again. It should be made clear, however, that the intent is not to retain bibliographic records for approval rejects in the system forever. If the only copy holding statement attached to the bibliographic record is the one for the approval reject, the record is given an action date of three years in the future. In three years when the record appears on an action list, it will be reviewed, and, if no other copy holdings have been attached to it, the record will be deleted. It may be decided later to leave these records in longer than three years. It should also be stated that this same procedure is followed for canceled orders. I would just like to say in closing that if you have manual files with information useful to you in performing your normal duties, put them into the online file. Be creative! As far as I am concerned, it makes no sense to do otherwise. Index redesign in NOTIS, which will allow bibliographic records to display only in the technical services mode will certainly remove much of the criticism for having these files in the online system [2].
NOTES 1. University of South Florida. Fuculty/Stuff Handbook. Tampa, FL: University of South Florida, 1986, 7. 2. Since this talk was presented, the USF Library has implemented NOTIS 4.6 which allows bibliographic records to be suppressed from displaying in the online catalog. Also, at the request of the Catalog Department, we began a six-month test project in January 1991, where, instead of loading the diskette records, cataloging staff began to download bibliographic records from OCLC into our database as soon as the approval shipments were received. This project will be used to determine if time could be saved by not having to overlay the diskette records at the time the books are cataloged.