Outsourcing Library Technical Services Operations; Practices in Academic, Public and Special Libraries

Citation

Cassell, K.A. and Mercado, M.I. (1999), "Outsourcing Library Technical Services Operations; Practices in Academic, Public and Special Libraries", The Bottom Line, Vol. 12 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/bl.1999.17012aad.004

Outsourcing Library Technical Services Operations; Practices in Academic, Public and Special Libraries

Outsourcing Library Technical Services Operations; Practices in Academic, Public and Special Libraries

Edited by Karen A. Wilson and Marylou ColverAmerican Library AssociationChicago1997

Keywords: Libraries, Outsourcing, Technical services

The editors of this book have collected case studies on outsourcing technical services from academic, public and special libraries. The editors' purpose was to collect examples of successful outsourcing. Some are reports of completed projects while others are ongoing. Articles from academic libraries predominate ­ 11 of the 16 articles. The editors chose different size libraries to demonstrate that outsourcing can provide savings in small as well as large libraries although savings was not the only motive for outsourcing. Some of the reasons for outsourcing were: "reduce original cataloging turnaround time, improve the quality of cataloging, provide professional catalogers with more time for public service duties, deal with accumulated backlogs, access expertise not available in-house, and compensate for lack of available work space." Interestingly the editors suggested to their authors that they share their writing with their vendors for comments and to keep them in the loop since the vendor-library relationship is crucial to making outsourcing successful. Many aspects of outsourcing are covered in this book including original and copy cataloging of books, physical processing, vendor preprocessing of approval materials, book selection, cataloging of specialized materials such as foreign language materials, audiovisual materials and music scores, document delivery, table of contents delivery, HTML editing of tables of contents and book reviews for electronic journals, acquisitions, and authority control (retrospective and ongoing). It is important to note that these successful examples had certain characteristics in common. They included a close working relationship with the vendor, and constant monitoring of the vendor particularly the turnaround time and the rate of error.

In his foreword Ernie Ingles, Executive Director, Learning Systems, University of Alberta, noted that these successful outsourcing case studies went beyond the usual vendor-librarian relationship in that the services developed often were not the vendor's standard product. These relationships are described as "dynamic relationships." Among the outsourcing projects described are the following: the ongoing outsourcing program at the University of Alberta for cataloging and physical processing of new monographs, the outsourcing of document delivery and a table of contents service by Stanford University's Graduate School of Business Library, the outsourcing of physical processing, copy cataloging and authority control at the Houston Public Library, and the outsourcing of cataloging and database maintenance at the Chubb Law and Business Library. Although outsourcing has become a bad word in the last couple of years, this book shows that there is room for appropriate outsourcing that will help the library to better utilize its budget and its staff. There is also a selected annotated bibliography at the end of this book.

Kay Ann Cassell is Associate Director,Programs and Services, for the New York Public Library's Branch Libraries.

Marina I. Mercado is an Adjunct Faculty member at Mercy College, New York, and a consultant in international business.