Notes
- Cornell uses the NOTIS system. The bibliographic records for wanted titles are downloaded to a screen dump file on a personal computer. Using software developed in-house the downloaded records are rebuilt into a data base file from which want lists are automatically generated. The data files are dBase™ files and the code is in Clipper™ (Summer 1987 version). This software and supporting data files are available to other libraries, for a $10 handling and postage charge, under the conditions that it will not be used for commercial purposes and that it will not be supported. It would require very little modification for libraries that want to download RLIN or OCLC records. To order (prepaid orders only accepted), send check for $10 made out to Cornell University to: Downloading Software, Acquisitions Department, Cornell University Library, 110 Olin Library, Ithaca, NY 148535301.
- BookQuest is a service that attempts to match wants and offers for books. The data base has over 300,000 records, of which close to 75 percent are offers by over 400 booksellers. (This information was communicated privately to the author by Karen Preslock of ABACIS in late May 1991.). As new titles are added, BookQuest attempts to match them with records already in the data base. If a match is found, both parties who added matching records are notified through ABACIS’s electronic mail system. The costs involved are $50 per connect hour ABACIS, and $2 per match. The communications costs can be lowered by sending records on disks to ABACIS for batch loading.
- The body of literature dealing with out-of-print literature in the United States is not huge, but it is scattered through time, so that one can spend a long time with indexes getting all the citations together. The following sources offer a good overview for libraries of the out-of-print problem and the industry: Schenck, William Z. “The Acquisition of Out-of-Print Books,” AB Bookman’s weekly (1981), 4015–4032. Barker, Joseph W., Rottman Rebecca A., and Ng Marilyn “Organizing Out-of-Print and Replacement Acquisitions for Effectiveness, Efficiency, and the Future,” Library Acquisitions: Practice & Theory, 14 (1990), 137–163.
- It is possible that better results could have been obtained by sending a list to AB Bookman’s Weekly. Jacob Chernofsky, editor of that publication, certainly thinks so. In a conversation with the author before ALA last June, he expressed surprise that we were not using his journal for listing wants. The effectiveness of one publication compared with the other should be the subject of another study.
- The author assumes that the cost of preparing records for loading into BookQuest would be greater, since each had to be keyed in from scratch, whereas the records in the lists were downloaded from the NOTIS data base. On the other hand, duplicating the lists and stuffing the envelopes and sending them involved costs not matched in the process of loadhtg records into BookQuest. It was not necessary to identify or measure these costs for this study.
- Letter from Clark Easter, President of ABACIS, to BookQuest/SerialsQuest users sent with the latest software release in August, 1991.