We are also a small university library, with about 1500 current
subscriptions. We recently took a look at our subscriptions to titles that
our agent charges a "net title fee" to handle. The publishers  of these
titles don't give the agent a discount, so the agent charges us this net
title fee in addition to the regular service charge. I found that many of
these titles were published by a few university or society publishers, who
have web sites, and toll-free phone numbers. We decided to place
subscriptions to 42 titles directly with 4 publishers, saving about
$1500.00 this year in service charges and fees.

At this time I wouldn't consider changing all of our subscriptions to
direct because of the claiming and billing workload, but with these four
publishers the claiming should be no more problematic than placing through
an agent, due to the web and toll-free numbers. And we were able to process
all of the subscriptions with each of these publishers at one time, so only
had to cut one check for each publisher.

At 10:31 AM 1/7/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>Amanda,
>
>We are a small college library with 1300 titles. Though we currently work
>with EBSCO, we are also considering eliminating the jobber. I am very
>interested in the replies you receive to your question.  Would you share
>them? Thank you.
>
>Marianne Simmons
>Serials Librarian
>Lavery Library
>Saint John Fisher College
>msimmons@sjfc.edu
>585-385-7399
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: digest Amanda Myers [mailto:AmandaMyers@FERRIS.EDU]
>Sent: Monday, January 06, 2003 3:22 PM
>To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU
>Subject: Re: Faxon/Rowecom/divine
>
>Hello,
>
>With the Divine confusion, we are considering not working with a jobber
>but instead, ordering titles directly from the publisher.  I'm at a
>state-assisted university serving 9,000 FTE students and 500 faculty.  We
>were obtaining approximately 600 journal titles from Divine.  I'm
>interested in learning of any library out there with demographics
>comparable to ours that is getting their journals directly from the
>publisher, i.e., without using a subscription jobber; is anyone doing or
>considering doing this?
>
>Please feel free to email me directly.
>
>Amanda Myers
>Serials Librarian
>1010 Campus Drive, FLITE 208
>Ferris State University, Big Rapids, Michigan 49307-2279
>email: myersa@ferris.edu
>phone: (231) 591-3012  fax: (231) 591-3724

Linda Grooms
Periodicals Supervisor
lgrooms@stetson.edu