Director of the Garfield Library in Brunswick, New York, and author of A Practical Guide to Internet Filters (Neal-Schuman, 1997)
kgs@bluehighways.com
Column for May 1999
With respect to collection development, many of us are straddling two worlds. We still park in front of the television, highlighter in hand, to mark up the latest review magazine; later we laboriously key this data into online catalog acquisition modules, separate databases, or—for the truly anachronistic—3x5 cards. We might even phone in our orders, or at best, upload them through clunky CD-ROM tools or modem-based connections (How 1980s of us!). If we’re lucky, the book gets to the shelf before the patron does.
However, the Web is rapidly changing how we do collection development, and the availability of online bookstores—the poor librarian’s Books in Print—is just the beginning. Dire warnings about the quality of data on amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com wear a little thin when you consider the price. And as Sarah Dentan, young adult librarian at Stanislaus County Library in Modesto, California, notes, Amazon is “easy on the eyes—The format is really user-friendly.” In addition to the e-mail notification service for new titles she’s interested in, she likes the large, clear book cover images, which are great for asking a patron, “Do you mean this book?”
Farther up the evolutionary chain, but still free, are some great tools designed for booklovers and librarians alike. In the Best Little Web Site That Could category, try www.bookbrowser.com, “a site dedicated to reading” maintained by two librarians, Janet Lawson and Cindy Orr, who have the hearts of great reference librarians and the brains of computer programmers. For out-of-print books, Carolyn Caywood of Virginia Beach (Va.) Public Library particularly recommends Bookfinder, one of several antiquarian sites on ACQWeb, all of which were able to locate a variety of editions for Leo Rosten’s out-of-print Oh Kaplan! My Kaplan!
The rubber really hits the ramp with the expensive, quirky but promising online collection tools produced by Baker & Taylor and Ingram—respectively, Title Source II and I-Page.
I have strong emotions about both tools. On the one hand, these Web-based vendor storehouses, with their massive real-time inventories and astute search engines, represent the future of collection-development tools for libraries, and hold out the promise of making selection smarter and more efficient. On the other hand, when I use them I get the feeling I am paying through the nose for the privilege of beta-testing a very early version of a product.
If you are accustomed to shopping online, you may be extremely surprised to find that you can’t actually order through I-Page (though there’s a fix due in the next version, coming “soon”). The salesman kept telling me I could download the MARC records, and I know many large libraries use acquisition systems (though several libraries reported being unable to use either product just yet, due to incompatibilities). But Ingram wants $1,700 a year for a bookstore you can’t actually buy anything with? Okay, I thought, I’ll just take my little customized basket of books, switch to print view, print from the Web, then call in my ISBNs. No such luck—There is no “print view.” I ended up tussling with downloaded records, which I imported into a spreadsheet, sorted, printed, bumped against my existing database. . . . Oh brave new world, with such a lot of work in it.
Beyond ordering, I-Page also lacks separate, customizable accounts for staff, with different privilege levels—a feature available in Title Source II. Both products are missing reviews from Booklist, a source I can’t live without, and seem to acquire their reviews more slowly than the online bookstores. Title Source II is beginning to add book covers, and I-Page only has small images. And several librarians, including Susan Hagloch of Tuscarawas County Public Library in New Philadelphia, Ohio, wrote to say they were holding off on either product until they included videos. With most public libraries reporting huge jumps in AV circulation, that’s understandable. Finally, most of the time I-Page seemed fast, but Title Source II sometimes seemed ponderous, even over cable Internet—a problem reported by several librarians on Publib earlier this year.
Having said that, my library has a consortium account for I-Page, courtesy of Albany Public Library, and I’m already addicted to I-Page for reference and selection work. If we had an account for Title Source II, I’d probably be stuck on that as well. Both tools easily and graphically display nearly real-time inventories—wonderful for those of us on very limited budgets who keep back orders to a minimum.
The “list view” for an I-Page search is slick and easy to use, and has the ability to quickly sort by a variety of categories—author, title, and what I like best, Ingram demand. Another plus for both products is the ability to create many different carts, and the intelligence of these carts—they know if you have a book in any category and alert you if you’re about to select a duplicate entry (although an online cost tally for I-Page, and a discount estimator for both products, would be welcome).
WWWhat’s New, unique to I-Page, has become my companion to my first cup of coffee in the morning; the alerts to big print runs, media reviews, and other events are fantastic. Now I have one single source for helping the patrons who come in saying Oprah “talked about a great book today—Now what was it?” Not only that, but with advance information, increasingly I can tell them we have the book on hand already—some media provide information weeks in advance (and Ingram thoughtfully keeps old items for two weeks).
For a real hint of the future in I-Page, browse by category, then click “Forthcoming”; if reviews were consistently available for these titles, this really would replace—and vastly streamline—the old highlighter-and-magazine method of selection. I can also imagine building collection plans through I-Page or Title Source II—selecting authors or series, or even subject areas, and telling the vendors to send me all future related titles until I say otherwise. But I’m not tossing out my pocketful of highlighters—not just yet.