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 On Tue, Jan 24, 2017 at 5:33 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > > From: Steve Oberg <[log in to unmask]> > Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2017 02:58:03 +0000 > > Jim and others, > > I agree that this is a very good series. To answer your question, we don’t publicize these in a special way except perhaps to highlight them in course- or subject-related guides (we use LibGuides from Springshare). Also, we don’t shelve them together. > > But the main reason I’m writing is to take issue with your choice of words: “…I worry that they would disappear into our OPAC and be essentially invisible.” I think you were focusing on a way to highlight the series as a set and to make them more visible, physically — but putting these in the OPAC is precisely a way that will help to draw attention to them. And they are easily collocated in most OPACs by series title (“Very Short Introductions”). Just typing in the words “very short introductions” into a keyword search in our OPAC brings them readily together. > > Over twenty five years of work in a wide variety of large and small academic libraries, as well as a large corporate library, has shown me that one of the best ways to ensure use of library materials is for them to be properly cataloged. I’m including e-resources in this, not just print and other traditional formats. Over and over again, I can point to cases where usage was low _until_ cataloging was done and the material was readily findable in the OPAC, and then usage took off. Somehow it still seems to surprise. It shouldn’t. > > There are of course larger philosophical issues at play and I have never held the view that the OPAC — or even our discovery layer — is the center of the universe for our users to find everything they want. It isn’t, and it hasn’t been for a long time. But it _is_ still a critical source of information and exposure for our materials, one that we should not overlook. > > Steve > > Steve Oberg > Assistant Professor of Library Science > Electronic Resources and Serials > Wheaton College (IL) > +1 (630) 752-5852 > > NASIG Vice-President/President-Elect > > On Jan 23, 2017, at 7:04 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > > From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]> > Date: Sat, 21 Jan 2017 07:35:25 -0700 > > Oxford Press publishes a series of useful and smart paperbacks under > the "Very Short Introductions" rubric: 502 volumes at last count on > topics like: > > Buddhist Ethics, Cancer, Catholicism, Chaos, Children's Literature, > Chinese Literature, Choice Theory, Christian Art, Citizenship, Civil > Engineering, Classics, Clausewitz, Climate > > They sell for about $8 each on Amazon. A license for digital access > for a campus might cost as much as a complete print set I'm guessing. > They're very well done and offer an appreciably-better-than-Google > introduction to a wide variety of subjects. But I worry that they > would disappear into our OPAC and be essentially invisible. I'd be > tempted to buy the full print set and shelve them together in a > visible place: interesting if that were a way to make the print > version get more use than digital would. > > So I write now to ask if anyone knows of library experience promoting > this series, either digital or print. > > Jim O'Donnell > Arizona State University