The evolving approval plan: how academic librarians evaluate services for vendor selection and performance

Brown, Linda A.; Forsyth, John H.

doi:10.1016/s1464-9055(99)00036-6

Cited by 8 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 5 publications

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“…Brown and Forsyth surveyed 291 academic approval plan customers, asking questions about outsourcing among other subjects. Only 44 of the 146 respondents outsourced cataloging, and 33 outsourced processing (Brown and Forsyth, 1999) ± the larger the library, the greater the odds that it would outsource, but outsourcers were still in the minority.…”

Section: General Library Surveysmentioning

confidence: 99%

Outsourcing library technical services – what we think we know, and don’t know

Sweetland

2001

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Introductioǹ`Outsourcing'', or the use of outside contractors for important parts of a business's operations, seems to have begun in the automobile industry in the 1980s, but has become an issue in the library community since Wright State University eliminated its cataloging department in the early 1990s. Certainly, the timing of discussions in the library professions relates to three very prominent cases, starting with the elimination of the cataloging department at Wright State University in 1993, followed by outsourcing the entire library of the law firm of Baker & MacKenzie in 1995, and the elimination of both cataloging and selection from the entire public library system of the state of Hawaii in the same year.Since then, hundreds of publications, conference papers and other discussions of the subject have appeared in the library world. While the most complete listing of this material appears in the ALA sponsored report on the subject (Martin et al., 2000), useful selective annotated bibliographies are also available in Colver (1997) and Be Ânaud and Bordeianu (1999). Although the vast majority of this material tends to polemics and how-we-did-it descriptions, there are also a number of analyses of both the philosophical and practical issues raised. DefinitionStrangely, given the interest in outsourcing, there is little consensus on what the term actually means, a problem possibly related to the use of terminology from outside librarianship (Miller, 1995).Richard Abel, the founder of approval plans, defines outsourcing as``simply the contracting out of a variety of`backroom' functions to suppliers in the private sector'' (Abel, 1998), but then gives use of Library of Congress printed cards as an example, although LC is clearly not in the``private sector'' . Other writers use terminology similar to Baker's:``a method employed by an organisation to hire or contract with an outside individual, vendor, or agency toThe author

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Section: General Library Surveysmentioning

confidence: 99%