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A few clarifications were requested by participants and others; please see revised minutes below.

Heidi Hass

New York Collection Development Discussion Group

October 10, 2003

American Folk Art Museum

The meeting began with a welcome from James Mitchell, Librarian of the American Folk Art Museum. He introduced AnnaMaria Poma-Swank, who discussed the agenda for the meeting, and introduced our featured speaker, William P. Kane, regional sales manager for Alibris Library Services. Mr. Kane is a former bibliographic instruction, systems, and collection development librarian, with an MLS from the University of Pittsburgh, and over a dozen years of experience in academic libraries before joining the vendor side of the business.

Mr. Kane began by stating that other online booksellers could have been more popular with libraries if they’d chosen to be, and that Alibris understands that libraries purchase books differently than individuals do. He believes that acquisitions librarians can work easily with the Alibris database, and that Alibris has paid attention to libraries’ need to use purchase orders, and to record a selector’s name, for example. The Alibris database can be searched by subject, by LC classification number, and by call number range, in addition to author, title and keyword.

Three years ago Alibris had 5 million books from 800 dealers, today they have 30 million books, and about 4,000 booksellers in their database. There are some coffee table books, of course, but Mr. Kane states that millions of titles are unique in the database. Each copy is listed separately to show condition. Supply and demand means that prices and margins go down; however, particularly for astute dealers, sales are up. It’s been reported that twenty percent of overall online book sales are now for used books.

Question: what is the relationship between book dealers, and Alibris?

Alibris has their own warehouse in Sparks, Nevada, which contains their own inventory of 1 million books, which they price and describe. Book dealers must have a minimum inventory of 1,500 titles listed on Alibris; listing is free. When a book is sold on Alibris library service, they buy the book from the dealer at a discount, and make money by marking up the dealer price. Alibris does all invoicing, and will try to send books together, on one invoice. All returns are made to Alibris, regardless of whether the book was originally theirs, or from a dealer.

Regarding retrospective collection development a consolidator like Alibris will take a list of wants in an Excel spreadsheet, match it against their database, and create a report of what’s available.

A museum librarian in the audience is trying to persuade his book store manager to list excess collection catalogues on Alibris, since listing is free. Cover price is discounted 20 percent. Advanced Book Exchange (Abebooks) just eliminated their library service, so library orders are now directed to the individual dealer, and libraries must determine correct payment type, foreign currency, etc.

Alibris’ fill rate is 90%; 10% of orders are cancelled because a book is no longer available. Alibris serves all types of libraries, not just academic, for example, like Blackwell’s. They are working with large academic libraries on several special retrospective collection development projects.

Alibris has ca. 6,000 library customers, most of which use Alibris for only a small percentage of monograph orders. Ten percent of the $2 billion world-wide library book buying budget is estimated to go towards used books.

Question: are European publications available? Alibris does have UK, Spanish Portuguese and some German titles in the database. Mr. Kane prefers the distinction “available/not available” to “in print/out of print.”

The Alibris database contains 600,000 new book titles from Ingram. Yankee Book Peddler and Blackwell’s are partners; it would be advantageous to have the database mirrored in their “Collection manager”-type products. The Alibris database has a file of 40 million MARC records, bought from the British Library and LC, to back up its search functions. If Alibris does not list a title, it will offer to re-submit the search in WorldCat (as will Abebooks). All Alibris titles are not necessarily listed in search engines such as Bookfinder or Add All.

Alibris can  process 50 books/hour, by pre-populating most fields with data from the database; they are mainly adding condition information and price. The company was originally financed by venture capital; Marty Manley, CEO, bought Dick Weatherford’s company, Interloc.

Other services of interest to libraries: when purchasing books from foreign dealers, price is still in dollars, and the mark-up does not increase. Shipping for more than 10 books is free, regardless of point of origin. Alibris will accept purchase orders without a pre-approval process.

New and forthcoming titles are a headache to list because of claims, but Mr. Kane does hope to list more new titles as they are published. They will work with their partners on this.

For a copy of Mr. Kane’s handout (in MS Powerpoint) please e-mail Heidi Hass [log in to unmask]

Topic: Consortial Subscriptions to expensive databases.

General consensus: budgets are smaller than they were, and that it’s very time-consuming to organize a consortium oneself. Suggested alternatives include:

·       NYLINK http://nylink.suny.edu (it’s not necessary to be an OCLC member library)

·       Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) http://www.metro.org

·       Westchester Academic Library Directors Consortium (WALDO) http://waldolib.org

·       Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design http://www.aicad.org/

Topic: FirstSearch: elimination of Wilson databases from per search option.

WilsonSelectPlus will be the only Wilson database available from FirstSearch on a transaction (per search) and subscription basis after December 17, 2003. It includes Art Full Text (coverage began in 1997) only. Art Abstracts (which contains the indexing of Art Index from 1984 to present, with abstracting from 1994) will be available from Wilson or via FirstSearch subscription. Art Index (from 1984) will only be available from Wilson directly. Strategies for coping include: create a relationship with a larger nearby institution. Join a group such as METRO to enable your users to use other libraries. Point your users to institutions such as NYPL, or research libraries that admit credentialed users. Columbia librarians report that all users are now charged for each page printed, so that new reader cards for outside users are required. Outside readers also have a limit of a set number of days. Cooperative acquisition program for electronic resources discussed again; a meeting with, or report from, the New York Electronic Resources Discussion Group was thought desirable. (That group will meet Nov. 14 at the Frick Art Reference Library; contact Suz Massen for information, [log in to unmask])

The meeting concluded, and participants enjoyed a reception courtesy of the museum and James Mitchell.

Submitted by Heidi Hass

Nov. 14, 2003

revised Nov. 25, 2003

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V. Heidi Hass
Head of the Reference Collection
The Pierpont Morgan Library
29 East 36th Street
New York, NY  10016-3403

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