On the Job

Our sales rep from Midwest (a book jobber) stopped by on his tour of Panhandle schools. He was concerned that we hadn't been buying much from them lately. Indeed, months ago I had gotten frustrated at not being able to find many needed items on their website, and gave them up in favor of Baker and Taylor. I learned today that instead of searching the "Midwest database," which contains only a fraction of their stock, I should have been using their "express entry" search engine. Oops. I'm not sure how much to blame myself for this mistake. On the one hand, I think their terminology is genuinely confusing: "database" suggests to me the catalogue itself and "express entry" merely a method of accessing it. On the other hand, looking back at the web site I can see that there are descriptions, though vague, of their respective functions. Better read the fine print more carefully next time. This revelation has given ammo to D.B., our acquisitions lady, who has continually urged me to use Midwest because their invoicing is much more perspicuous. Nevertheless, the library might be better served by sticking with B&T because their volume of business allows them to offer discounts Midwest cannot match. I reckon I'll need to sit down with a calculator and figure out how many more books per year we could expect to fit into our budget by using B&T, and balance that against the value of a contented acquisitions clerk.

We received a resume from a young librarian whose previous employment ended in March. No indication what he/she has been doing since then. I googled the name and found something interesting: a "what's new" page of an academic library web site announced that this person had been hired there in April for a two-year project. Suspicious.