ALA report, OP Discussion Group, Mid-winter & Annual 1996 Carole R. Bell 20 Sep 1996 20:34 UTC
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>]