From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2017 19:42:34 -0700

Tony, you provoke a story.  When I was first introduced to the staff
at ASU I told them what I still tell them.  Think about how you would
proceed if the library were a business that monetized every
transaction:  every search, every consult, every web page served,
every circulation transaction, every ILL, whatever.  (Then I
interrupted myself to reassure them that, no, we weren't going to
monetize everything!)  But think, I said, what you would do in that
case to push product.  What would you do to maximize revenue from
transactions?  Whatever the answer to that question might be:  that's
what we should be doing.  We're not in it for the money, but we're in
it because we believe we have The Good Stuff, the high quality,
curated, peer-reviewed, significant, factual, truthful, provocative,
cutting-edge stuff and we believe that it's in our users' interest for
us to be as successful as possible in helping them find what they need
in order to be amazingly successful in their academic work.

We've all got a long way to go to make that happen, but I strongly
believe it's what we have to do and who we have to be.  We're doing a
major building redesign now and we're going to put special collections
on the main floor.  A nineteen-year-old coming into the building to do
their calculus homework is going to see something that's new to them
and that piques their curiosity into coming back and going for more:
the equivalent of putting the cosmetics counter at the entrance to the
department store from the mall.  If we push product successfully,
we'll be valued and valuable for a long time.  Fail in that mission
and we all lose.

P.S. wouldn't it be interesting if more publishers and vendors thought
the same way about the products they push to libraries?

Thanks for the prompt,
Jim O'Donnell
ASU


On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 3:42 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Tony Sanfilippo <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2017 21:04:57 -0500
>
> This issue fascinates me because it touches on the intersection of
> librarianship and bookselling. In bookselling what you're talking
> about has a name. It's called merchandising. That refers to the
> display of new products in a way that brings attention to them. In
> bookselling it can be controversial because there are monetary rewards
> available for merchandising in the form of a practice called co-op,
> where a publisher pays a bookseller to augment the cost of advertising
> in local media with the bookseller, or the publisher pays for
> prominent placement in the bookseller's store, or on the bookseller's
> website (yes, that website).
>
> What fascinates me about this issue is the reluctance of librarians to
> take on an editorial role. In the case of the bookseller, they can
> choose whether the promotion of a title is ultimately in the best
> interest of the store and if they're willing to make the Faustian
> bargain behind a co-op agreement because they ultimately feel that
> what they're promoting is in sync with what the store is saying about
> its stock.This economic dilemma, taking money from the supplier, isn't
> an issue for the librarian.
>
> For librarians, it's an entirely different matter and the ethics of
> librarianship seem to frown on the kind of editorial and marketing
> decisions that bring attention to its collections' foci. Librarians
> seem to value objective discovery over their own informed
> recommendations.
>
> While this might seem like a leap, I think that ethos (which I find
> librarians also bring to their publishing efforts,) doesn't serve them
> well. They have long been wise and trusted gatekeepers. Why is it when
> the rubber hits the road they take a step back and defer to the patron
> and insist the patron is best served by offering a largely unedited
> variety of choices rather than also offering an opinion on the quality
> of the options? That is what a good bookseller is doing when he
> merchandises. Why is that so antithetical to the mission of the
> library? Isn't the inability to discern what's worth paying attention
> to how we got where we are today? Shouldn't those of us who can
> discern the difference between the wheat and the chaff being doing
> more to promote the wheat?
>
> Best,
> Tony
>
> Tony Sanfilippo, Director
> Ohio State University Press
> 180 Pressey Hall
> 1070 Carmack Road
> Columbus, OH 43210-1002
> ohiostatepress.org
> (614) 292-7818