On March 16, 1995, a roundtable discussion entitled "Back Issues: Services, Problems, Solutions" was held at Healy Library, University of Massachusetts, Boston, MA. The meeting was hosted by ACRL's New England Chapter and was chaired by Rebecca Breedlove. In attendance were approximately 50 serials libraries from institutions in New England. I was invited to participate and I presented remarks on "back Issues: services, etc." from the perspective of United States Book Exchange. John T. Zubal United States Book Exchange 2969 West 25th St Cleveland, OH 44113 <JohnZ45897@AOL.COM> --------- Back Issues: Services, Problems, Solutions: A Worm's Eye View Roundtable Discussion - Healey Library University of Massachusetts - Boston March 16, 1995 The topic of this roundtable discussion is Back Issues: Services, Problems, Solutions. I would like to address the three parts of the title in a sequence different from that advertised. First, I will try to define PROBLEMS, then explain SERVICES and suggest SOLUTIONS. It seems to me that all serials librarians have one major PROBLEM with BACK ISSUES; I think they will agree that there is never enough budget to maintain collections. If we accept that budget is THE serials librarian's PROBLEM, then it follows that I as a potential or actual supplier must do what's best to help you handle back issues efficiently. And, more importantly, I must also guarantee that your limited funds will be most productively and prudently used with USBE. Speaking only for USBE, I must confess that the main problem I face every day is the problem of COMMUNICATIONS. Put another way, my main problem is COMMUNICATING to potential clients that USBE is here to help them achieve their goals of maximizing budget and efficiently maintaining collections. Through a variety of means USBE contacts approximately 20,000 libraries of all kinds in North America several times annually. The usual means is direct mail of USBE literature, addressed to a range of staff in university, public, medical, technical and other libraries. The "USBE literature" may be a booklet which summarizes USBE services, it may be the annually issued SHELF LIST, it may be a questionaire. From time to time we also conduct telephone canvassing of libraries. And we have a staff member who likes to travel for the organization and she has visited, since 1992, approximately 500 libraries throughout the USA. She has met with individual serials librarians and has had conferences with assemblies of staff. From time to time, I make presentations to groups similar to this one at regional or national meetings. In all, I conservatively estimate that USBE since 1990 has had upwards of 300,000 contacts with librarians in North America. I believe that USBE's message to librarians has been clear, consistent and repetitive. However, our success rate, when measured against the the statistic of 300,000 contacts, indicates there's a lot of confusion among librarians about USBE, its activities, its policies, its financial health. It's my intention, in the next part of my talk, to dispell the assumptions and rumors that have confused the people who should have the clearest understanding of what USBE seeks to accomplish. Here are examples of the notions that USBE wishes to dispell: 1. Don't get your back issues from USBE; after all the organization is bankrupt. 2. USBE has only a handful of member libraries and they're really disappointed with the organization. 3. USBE has defaulted on its obligations to libraries that had deposited tens of thousands of dollars with it. 4. USBE requires its members to send their duplicate and discard periodicals to it. 5. USBE never even pays shipping charges for contributions of back issues from libraries. 6. USBE only sells its journals and never donates to libraries. 7. Dealing with USBE actually complicates a library's record keeping....their membership fees, assessments, and sliding price scale are very complicated and confusing. Some of these invalid assumptions were presented in a document originally distributed a few weeks ago at ALA Mid-Winter; I will distribute copies of it at the conclusion of my presentation. Others have been conveyed to USBE staff by librarians. These are the major PROBLEMS which hinder USBE's role in the supply of back issues; let's talk about SERVICE and SOLUTIONS; I think they are so closely related that we may be able to say that the SOLUTION is in the SERVICE. When I was invited to participate in today's discussion, I was at first reluctant. My reluctance was based on a realization that I am almost totally ignorant about the topic to be discussed. That's right; despite my having worked in the periodicals trade for nearly 35 years, I really have not had the experience necessary to give you more than a worm's eye view of "Back Issues: Services, Problems & Solutions". The facts of geography have isolated me from the larger back issues trade. While the North American back issues trade has largely been concentrated on the Atlantic coast, along the line Boston-New York City-Washington with a few stops in between, I have lived and worked in the hinterlands, nearly 500 miles from New York City and 700 from Boston. I have been ignorant of developments in the trade; I have not been privy, for example, to impending buy-outs, bankruptcies, fire sales, mergers, firings, business divorces, or, hirings; and unlike virtually every other player in the back issues trade, I never worked for another back issues supplying company or individual. I am totally self-trained and the company which I founded in the early 60s and the organization which I have headed since early 1990, have functioned without reference to the trade at large. A few examples: Marshall and I have met twice at J. S. Canner (once in 1963 and, again, in 1991); Don and I met once prior to today, at a NASIG event in San Antonio a few years ago; I have never visited the Jaeger organization. On the other hand, only one or two of the people who are currently active in the back issues trade have ever visited me in Cleveland. And while John T. Zubal, Inc., maintains regular and frequent business ties with virtually all firms in the trade, that relationship is very antiseptic, long having been characterized by brief written correspondence. None of my colleagues has ever invited me to discuss the back issues trade in general or in detail, none has ever asked for facts about how we work or have worked to supply back issues. It is because of the relative isolation in which I live and work that I stated earlier I am qualified only to give you a worm's eye view of services, problems and solutions in the back issues supply trade. Were you to ask me to evaluate the way other firms function, how they price, how dependable they are, and so forth, any answer I would attempt would be no more valid than answers I might give you to questions about brain surgery, the Mexican economy or programming a VCR. I can, however, give you accurate and true information on USBE, how it functions and how its SERVICE can be a SOLUTION. Shortly after the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Washington approved my application to revive U.S.B.E. and take the organization out of Chapter Seven bankruptcy, I received twenty-eight large cases of the organization's recent files. In all, the records weighed about 2,500 lbs. and it soon became very clear to me this profusion of paperwork covered only the previous three years of USBE's activity. I later learned that the main USBE archive, covering the the years 1948 until about 1986, had been deposited at University of Illinois and apparently now fills a medium size warehouse. I spent an afternoon examining a morass of invoices, want lists, claims letters, job applications, etc. etc. etc. and I learned that while USBE had a mandate to supply back issues to its member libraries, an enormous amount of effort was put into activities which were only of dubious relevance to members' needs. Some of these activities were the warehousing of publishers' backstocks, the maintenance of seemingly endless inventory records, the holding in mort main of virtually every publication which came to it, solicited and unsolicited, from an array of sources. It was obvious to me that sometime prior to 1986, USBE had ceased to be true to its mandate and mission, had failed to re-evaluate its members' current needs, had very little sense of or appreciation for changes in the market. And, almost incidentally along the way USBE allowed an internal bureaucracy to develop which couldn't possibly survive without the kinds of subsidies Congress had lavished on the organization until the early 1970s. On the basic business level, it was also clear that USBE's response time to members' requests approached four weeks and the fill rate had fallen to about 12%. Oh yes, within the mountain of paperwork was the official USBE operations manual. It's the size of a bound volume of Chemical Abstracts and equally exciting reading. It now has a permanent place gathering dust in the archives. I don't think we have to go into more details about USBE's lamentable service level at the time doors were closed by the Bankruptcy Court. Let's move on and talk about what the new USBE administration began to do in early 1990 to re-establish the organization as a major supplier of back issues to libraries. First, the Board of Trustees gave me wide discretionary authorities to accomplish two major and inter-related goals: Bring the organization out of bankruptcy and establish and maintain efficient, members-oriented service practices focusing on the prompt and inexpensive delivery of back issues. USBE's creditors had filed approximately $485,000 worth of claims. We recognized these claims and, to date, we have paid off all but about $65,000 which amount is owed to libraries that pick away at it by placing orders, some regularly, some occasionally and others infrequently. Unpaid salaries due to former employees, long overdue utilities bills, bills for computer services, rents, and so on have all been satisfied. I am happy to share with you the fact that the bankruptcy of USBE is now a closed chapter in the organization's history and the organization has no debt. I expect the court-appointed trustee will be discharged before the end of 1995. What quality of service should members expect from USBE? As already mentioned, the Board has given me authority to do whatever is practical to make USBE the service-oriented leader in the back issues trade. The organization operates on a very low calorie, lean diet based on the principal "KEEP IT SIMPLE". Here are some of the ways we KEEP IT SIMPLE: 1. SPEED: We guarantee orders will be processed and en route to you within five work days of receipt. If that's not good enough, members may ask for rush service. When a rush order is received, it is given immediate attention. That means, if the order is received before noon, it will be processed and shipped before we close that day. If it's received after noon, it will be shipped no later than the following day. Do we ever slip up? Certainly. Approximately five out of every 100 orders leave six, seven, or eight days after receipt but we think you will agree that 95% efficiency isn't too bad. 2. ACCURACY: The last thing you want is to receive is a back issue you didn't order. All outgoing shipments are checked by three different persons: the person who gathered the back issues; the person who prepares billing; and the person who packs the order. Are there slip-ups? Yes. Every once in a while mistakes are still made. However, we ship the wrong back issue only about once in every 500 back issues. 3. FILL RATE: We haven't done a study on our rate of success in filling members' wants. Such a study would be extremely time consuming and really the kind of activity more in keeping with my predecessors' philosophy than with mine. Subjectively, I believe the average fill rate to be somewhere in the range of 30% to 50%. But fill rate is dependent largely on two factors: freshness of member's order (if you have scoured a wide range of suppliers before sending your back issues wants to USBE, our rate of return will probably be quite puny) AND vintage of the back issues you want (If your wants are entirely 1994-95 back issues, you have a lot of competitors for a limited supply of goods; if you require older back issues, I have a sense that our fill rate will be about 75%). 4. COST/PRICES/CHARGES: As you know, USBE is a membership organization. All members, since January 1, 1991, pay the same membership fee: $150. Here's what members get when they pay that fee: A. REBATE COUPON: It has a value of 20 back issues which, in monetary terms is $140. It is issued to every member upon receipt of the annual membership fee. It may be used only once in the membership year, at a time selected by the member library. We suggest that members use the COUPON when they need a large array of back issues because if you submit the COUPON with an order for, say, 25 back issues, chances are we will have only 10 to 14; in the interests of KEEP IT SIMPLE, the COUPON may be used only once; it's not a declining balance credit. During 1994, USBE issued 1,296 REBATE COUPONS; all will be honored if presented during the membership year and new REBATE COUPONS will be issued to all re-newing members as well as to new members. B. GUARANTEED ACCESS TO EVERY BACK ISSUE USBE HOLDS. This is really what membership in USBE is all about. Because the vast majority of USBE's back issues are harvested from the duplicates and discards of member and non-member libraries, members have immediate and exclusive access to them. C. SERVICE CHARGE. Many of you may remember the television commercial of a year or two ago in which a waitress at Pizza Hut was asked the prices of pizza with pepperoni (FOUR BUCKS), mushrooms (FOUR BUCKS); anchovies (FOUR BUCKS) and so on. It's much the same at USBE: Every back issue that we supply carries a service charge of SEVEN BUCKS. Reader's Digest? SEVEN BUCKS; American Historical Review? (SEVEN BUCKS); Journal of Biological Chemistry? (SEVEN BUCKS); Chemical Abstracts? SEVEN BUCKS!!!! Complete volumes are pro rata with a minimum charge of $28. This standard service charge enables USBE to KEEP IT SIMPLE. Where the organization formerly had four or five people preparing invoices, we have one person doing all the billing (and additional work besides). As those of you who are members know, all bills for back issues have one line which states the number of back issues sent times the SEVEN DOLLAR service charge, plus shipping charges. Whether we ship one issue or a thousand issues, every member receives the same one line invoice and a copy of its original order with our notations showing what has been shipped. C. OTHER CHARGES, PENALITIES, ASSESSMENTS??? There just aren't any. That's it. While we urge members to contribute their duplicate and surplus back issues to USBE, we do not require such donations. Curiously, we have members who never order a single back issue but contribute issues regularly; by the same token, there are a few members who send no duplicate back issues to USBE but place orders daily. Even though we encourage members and non-members to send their duplicate periodicals, the matter, is voluntary and left to the discretion of the individual member. Approximately 97% of members recognize that it's in their self-interest to send their duplicates to USBE. And, incidentally, USBE will pay shipping charges and even more in some circumstances. Oh, yes! I am happy to say that the SEARCH CHARGE was eliminated the day the first request for back issues came to the modern USBE in 1990. It will never be re-instated. These are the services USBE provides its members; I think they are the SOLUTION to the main problem which serials librarians must confront daily in their work. I will be happy to take your questions here or, if more convenient, by phone or mail, fax or e-mail. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- There has been some confusion about USBE's DONATIONAL PROGRAM. Perhaps I can explain how the PROGRAM functions because some of you may want to participate in it. Each week we set aside large quantities of back issues which have always been available at no charge except postage to libraries in underdeveloped countries and former Communist-dominated countries. And since 1991 we have sent approximately 400,000 back issues to libraries in countries such as the Philippines, Uganda, Tanzania, Ecuador, Albania, and Belarus. We have shipped complete medical and technical libraries to Tanzania at no cost to that country's people. In 1993 our trustees opened the DONATIONAL PROGRAM to all libraries that lack funds for back issues. I will be happy to give you details on how your library may become involved in the PROGRAM. Thank you very much for the opportunity to share my ideas and to give you some information about USBE's functions and goals.
