This report has been cross-posted to Acqnet, Colldv-l and Serialst.

1. Report of the Annual Conference meeting of the Out-of-Print Discussion
Group, New York City, July 7th, 1996:

Business meeting:  New Vice-Chair/Chair Elect: Narda Tafuri, University of
Scranton.
Chair for 96/97: Bill Slater, Brigham Young University

Topic:  OP from a publisher's perspective

Speakers: Allen Schulz, VP for Manufacturing Technology, McGraw-Hill.

Mr. Schulz discussed McGraw-Hill's new publishing process using electronic
Docutech color processes to produce texts electronically.  This innovation
will allow books to be printed on demand and will eliminate the need for OP
in the immediate future.  He discussed the various printing methods
currently available to publishers.  New pricing structures for the new forms
of printing are being reviewed and will hopefully be more reasonable in the
near future.  The name McGraw-Hill is using for this new philosophy of
publishing is "Title Life Management".  They will be developing partnerships
with other companies like Kinkos, R.R. Donnelly, etc, to produce print on
demand titles and will also be able to sell titles electronically over the
Internet or on CD.

Susan Kudrak, Sales Manager for Greenwood Publishing Group.  Ms. Kudrak took
a more traditional approach to our topic, explaining the 3 reasons for a
title going OP are: legal problems, the author wants his rights back, the
publisher never had the original rights and only has reprint rights for a
limited amount of time and that time has expired.  She discussed the
definitions of OP, OSI and OS from the publisher's point of view and how a
library might get a title.  She also talked about partnerships with
libraries to go about reprinting a title.  Greenwood keeps a file of
requests for reprinting and will proceed if they have enough titles
requested.  She also discussed the remaindering process and selling off
stock to remainder dealers.  They are also getting into the print on demand
arena.  They identify titles at the beginning of the process and create
shorter print runs and then will produce on demand additional copies at a
later time.

Crysanne Lowe, Marketing Director for Academic Press.  Ms Lowe discussed the
business model for print on demand.  She added information to Mr. Schulz'
talk about the docutech process, but talked more about on-line publishing
and serials projects that Academic is involved with for full text, web based
journals.

2. Report of the Annual Conference meeting of the Out-of-Print Discussion
Group, San Antonio, January 21, 1996

Topic: Using firm order vendors for Out-of-Print Searching.

Speakers: Knut Dorn, Harrassowitz; Charles Wittenberg, BNA; Miriam Lindsay,
Lindsay & Howes.

Summary: Each speaker discussed the methods used by their respective
companies to provide an OP searching service to their customers.  They
discussed how a library can set up a profile to provide for automatic OP
searching, eliminating the search and quote process.  They stressed the need
for librarians to respond quickly to quotes and talked about the methods
each uses to search for OP titles, publishers, authors, book dealers.  A
discussion ensued about procedures for handling the workflow with the
library to set up these profiles and plans.  Carole Bell discussed a project
she conducted to study methods of acquiring recent out-of-print titles using
these 3 vendors.  She felt that this method of acquiring recent OP titles
has been very successful at her library.

[From:  "Carole R. Bell" <crbell@NWU.EDU>]