Physical Processing

Approval Plans

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Description Top

Under an approval plan, the vendor automatically sends you publications that match a profile you set up for your library's collection. You "approve" the titles you want to add to your collection and return the ones that are not appropriate for your library. You only pay for the publications you keep. Items are shipped to you at the vendor's expense, but you may need to pay shipping for returns.

Under another type of approval plan, instead of sending you the actual books, the vendor sends you slips, forms or other selection tools for titles that match your profile. You then choose which items the vendor should ship.

The specifics of the vendors' approval plans vary. Please use the information in the table below for planning purposes and contact the vendors directly for more detailed information.

Purpose of an Approval Plan Top

Approval plans are intended to improve your library's collection development process by taking advantage of the vendors' relationships with publishers, knowledge of forthcoming titles, and vast databases of available titles. Approval plans can streamline the selection process in routine subject areas where your collection development is straightforward, and make you aware of relevant new titles in the more esoteric areas of your collection where your familiarity with the book trade may be more limited.

By changing the acquisitions workflow from up-front ordering to rejecting unacceptable titles, approval plans also significantly reduce your acquisitions paperwork.

Your Profile Top

Your approval profile is typically set up by subject area, according to the vendor's subject thesaurus or the LC classification system. It gives other collection parameters such as format, language, place of publication, and price range. An example might be: all English-language engineering titles from US publishers, issued in hardback and costing under $150.

To be sure that your profile is effective, you should keep track of your return rate and review and update your selection criteria regularly. To check the accuracy of your profile when you first set it up, ask the vendor to run it against his database and then compare the list of titles the profile generated to the list of titles you actually purchased last year.

Please contact your vendor for detailed information.

Service ID and

Company Name

Contact/Address

Telephone/FAX

E-mail

AC Academic Book Center

http://www.acbc.com

Wanda Jackson

5600 NE Hassalo Street

Portland, OR 97213

800-547-7704