Call for Papers:  Inside Outsourcing Technical Services: Upsides and Downsides

We invite you to submit brief abstracts (1-2 paragraphs or 100-200 words) prior to May 15th,
2019 for the December/January 2019/2020 issue of Against the Grain.
We are interested in a variety of perspectives and combinations of
perspectives.  We are looking for experiences from all types of libraries including academic, public, government and special libraries and welcome contributions from vendors and companies that provide the outsourcing services.  Please send your ideas to Stacey Marien,  smarien@american.edu and Alayne Mundt, mundt@american.edu

Some ideas we would be interested in reading about are:

1. What have been the pros and cons of shelf-ready at your library? Has your library done it and never looked back? Has your library tried it and decided it wasn’t worth it and then brought it back in-house?  How do you maintain quality control on shelf-ready records and materials? Has your library eliminated or significantly reduced copy-cataloging and use shelf-ready materials and record loads only? Has this hampered discovery or has there not been a noticeable change?
2. When faced with outsourcing technical services, has your library successfully argued to keep work in-house? Can and should outsourcing be avoided?
3. How has increased automation and outsourcing impacted internal workflows? Has it made technical services more complex or less complex? How has this changed skills needed and staffing in technical services departments?
4. How is your library performing quality control on vendor-supplied records, especially for thousands of vendor-supplied records loaded on a weekly or monthly basis? How have libraries and vendors worked together to improve or ensure record quality?

 

 

Stacey Marien
Acquisitions Librarian

American University

4400 Massachusetts Ave, NW

Library Technical Services

Spring Valley – Room 148

Washington, DC 20016
smarien@american.edu
202-885-3842
orcid.org/0000-0003-2608-4559