At 12:15 PM 8/21/2007, Selina Lin wrote:

>         Here at University of Iowa, we are about to acquire shelf-ready
>service from YBP. They will treat ALL individual volumes as monographs,
>including those that are part of serials and sets.
>         While our standing orders for serials are exempted from this
>service, and so still within our control, there will be non-standing
>order serials volumes randomly selected by our bibliographers and
>therefore supplied by YBP as books. In other words, there will be
>separate bib records for Title A, 2007 (or vol. 1), Title A, 2008 (or v.
>2), and so on.
>         It appears that YBP offers no option to exclude individual
>serials volumes from monographic treatment. What are other YBP customers
>dealing with this situation? Are people happy about this? If not, what
>alternatives are available? Any advice is welcome and much appreciated.
>
>       Selina Lin
>         University of Iowa

I haven't seen any responses to this on the list. I don't know
whether Selina Lin got any private responses, but she probably did
get several private requests to share any responses she got. That's
what happens to me when I ask questions on lists. Very few people
will post their responses to the list.

This is a DISCUSSION list. You can't have a discussion or even learn
from each other if people are afraid to post to the list. Nobody is
expecting perfection or fully-researched thesis postings simply
because it's going to a bunch of people instead of just one person.

People should not have to request to see the answers to a question,
and the asker should not have the burden of having to forward all the
responses to other people. It's so much easier to just read the
question and all the answers on the list. If they don't interest you,
you skip them. It's that simple.

I don't mean that nobody should ever send a private response. I
appreciate ANY response, and I try to express my appreciation. But
this pattern keeps repeating itself on multiple lists, and while it
is still nice to have the list to post to and get answers privately,
we're missing out on a lot by not being able to see what info is being shared.

So, getting back to Selina Lin's original question, I'm interested in
the answers and whether other book vendors have similar restrictions
with their shelf-ready services. Although we have outsourced and
automated quite a bit (we use PromptCat, electronic ordering and
invoicing through YPB) we have resisted shelf-ready processing
because of issues such as this. We also have many odd locations, and
we often don't know for sure until the item gets here where it will go.

Pat Thompson

Patricia Thompson
Assistant University Librarian for Resource Management Services
Jessie Ball duPont Library
The University of the South
Sewanee, TN 37383
Phone: 931-598-1657
Email: pthompso@sewanee.edu