Dear ARLIS/NA Colleagues:
I am doing some research for our head of collections here at University of Washington Bothell on how to
go about identifying books within our collection
that are now out-of-print and, for that reason, have increased in value.
I can imagine that this
is quite an issue with art monographs in particular, so I'm wondering if you or
your institution might have a process in place to identify
these books.
We had an incident here recently where a student returned a
book that was significantly damaged and not salvageable, and when we looked at the current price it was something
like $600, as it was no longer in print (but our standard fee for
damaged books is significantly less). We’d like to avoid this in the future and
instead send books such as these to our Special
Collections unit in Seattle, but we’re not sure how best to go about
identifying these books in our collection.
Any ideas or advice would be
most welcome!
All the best,
Heather Gillanders, MFA, MLIS
Research
& Instruction Librarian
UW
Libraries, Bothell Campus Library
Serving
UW Bothell and Cascadia Community College