College and Research Libraries E L D R E D SMITH Out-of-Print Booksearching This study compares various methods of out-of-print booksearching and discusses problems related to the evaluation of quotations, means of selecting and comparing dealers, library-dealer relations, and the role of advertising in locating desiderata. It sketches a program of booksearching applicable to the needs of a large and complex research library. O N E O F T H E M O S T curious features of this era of unprecedented library expan- sion is the comparatively slight attention that is being given to the problems and procedures of out-of-print booksearching. No matter how much one may subscribe to the argument that research libraries must give primary emphasis to the acqui- sition of in-print materials,1 out-of-print needs cannot be ignored. Whether'the desideratum is required immediately for course reserve or less urgently for re- search purposes, whether it is a single issue of a periodical needed for binding or a long run to fill in an important back set, its acquisition is of concern to the library. Nor can these needs be substantially answered, either now or in the forseeable future, by photocopy or reprints. Publi- cation delays, insufficient coverage, and expense are continuing problems with the latter, while technical difficulties— particularly in the area of library applica- tion—inhibit the utility of the former. As Shirley Heppel has noted, "a startling number of titles must still be sought on 1 Perhaps t h e best e x p o s i t i o n o f this view is J . P e r i a m D a n t o n . Book Selection and Collections ( N e w Y o r k : C o l u m b i a University P r e s s , 1 9 6 3 ) , 1 2 2 - 2 4 , 1 4 0 . Elclred Smith is the Head of the Search Division at the Library of the University of California, Berkeley, California. the o.p. market, and the millennium when every title is available at reason- able cost is still distant."2 Consequently, research libraries must rely primarily on the antiquarian market to meet their out-of-print needs. With the increasing competition of new li- braries and burgeoning graduate pro- grams, the "catch-as-catch-can" search procedures which still prevail in most college and research libraries,3 must give way to rational programs. The present article proposes guidelines for such a program, based on the experi- ence of one large research library. Dur- ing 1966-67, the search division of the University of California at Berkeley listed almost forty thousand wants with dealers and acquired almost six thousand desiderata. These included many kinds of materials—monographs, serials, docu- ments, maps—published throughout the world. It is not a rare books acquisition program, although many of the items sought are quite obscure. It is designed to meet the day-to-day out-of-print needs of a large and complex library. Carter and Bonk have noted that the generally accepted means of out-of-print booksearching can be grouped into two categories: those in which the library 2 " A S u r v e y o f O P B u y i n g P r a c t i c e s , " Library Re- sources and Technical Services, X ( W i n t e r 1 9 6 6 ) , 2 8 . 3 Ibid., 3 0 . / 303 304 / College b- Research Libraries • March 1968 acts as searcher and those in which it entrusts the actual searching to dealers or search services.4 On the basis of cost per item and rate of return, the UCB search division has found the first cate- gory to be more costly and less efficient. The primary means utilized by a li- brary in conducting its own out-of-print booksearching are checking dealers' cata- logs against its desiderata file and send- ing librarians or faculty members on buying trips. The advantage most fre- quently cited in favor of these methods is cost. It is assumed that the price of a book listed in a dealer's catalog or found in his stock is appreciably lower than the price of that same item if it were supplied by a search service in response to a request. Of course, the argument is quite reasonable: in the first instance, the dealer is trying to dispose of material on hand, without any certain knowledge (in many cases) that it is definitely wanted by anyone; in the second, he is offering something that he has been requested to locate and which has cost him time and effort to secure. Investigations by the UCB search di- vision have shown that, in terms of pur- chase price alone, books do cost less when ordered from a catalog rather than a search dealer. A study of all of the division's orders placed from December 1, 1966, through May 31, 1967, revealed a 20 per cent difference in favor of cata- log orders.5 When total cost was studied, however, it became evident that desiderata found in catalogs were actually much more expensive than those supplied by search dealers. The extensive checking involved in catalog ordering required an invest- ment of approximately six times the labor 4 Mary D u n c a n C a r t e r a n d W a l l a c e J o h n B o n k , Building Library Collections ( N e w Y o r k : S c a r e c r o w Press, 1 9 6 4 ) , 2 1 8 . 5 An e a r l i e r study, c o n d u c t e d b y t h e s e a r c h division in 1 9 6 4 , showed only a 1 0 p e r c e n t p r i c e d i f f e r e n c e , in f a v o r o f c a t a l o g orders. cost per order that was necessary to ac- quire an item by quotation—even when the entire search routine of listing wants, evaluating quotations, and writing orders was included. Finally, when the much higher cancellation rate of catalog orders was taken into account, the cost differ- ence rose even further.0 Buying trips have proved no more practical than catalog ordering as a means of obtaining specific desiderata. During the past several years, the UCB search division has prepared special lists for librarians and faculty members to take with them on book-buying trips. In no case has such a trip yielded as much as a 5 per cent return. Moreover, during the course of these trips, the division has had to refrain from submitting any of the titles included on these lists to its regular dealers, in order to avoid dupli- cation. This has caused a delay in ac- quiring needed items. On the other hand, when the UCB search division has utilized search deal- ers, total cost has been less and the re- turn has been much greater. During 1966-67, the division acquired 15 per cent of the items that it requested from dealers. When one recognizes that this searching is being done on a worldwide basis, this figure becomes even more im- pressive. For example, United States, Australian, Greek, and Arabic requests yielded a return well above 20 per cent, and Portuguese, Danish, and Italian ex- ceeded the general average. Consequent- ly, the division depends primarily on search dealers to secure its out-of-print needs.7 fi A study o f t h e division's c a n c e l l a t i o n s during April a n d M a y , 1 9 6 7 , s h o w e d t h a t 7 1 per c e n t o f the c a t a - log orders h a d b e e n c a n c e l l e d , as o p p o s e d to o n l y 7 p e r c e n t o f t h e orders b a s e d on q u o t a t i o n . 7 W h i l e d e a l e r - c a t a l o g r e v i e w and b u y i n g trijjs h a v e b e e n largely e l i m i n a t e d from t h e U C B s e a r c h division's p r o c e d u r e s , t h e y h a v e not b e e n e l i m i n a t e d from t h e l i b r a r y ' s t o t a l a c q u i s i t i o n p r o g r a m . T h e U C B library c o n t i n u e s to a c q u i r e a s u b s t a n t i a l n u m b e r o f o u t - o f - p r i n t m a t e r i a l s b y both t h e s e means. H o w e v e r , this is a c o m b i n e d s e l e c t i o n - a c q u i s i t i o n p r o g r a m ; it does n o t involve t h e u s e of a p r e - s e l e c t e d d e s i d e r a t a list. Even after a library has decided to conduct its booksearching through deal- ers, a number of problems remain to be solved. For example, can a large research library, with an extensive file of wants, follow Lyle's advice and use one or two dealers only?8 If not, how many should it use? Should it send the same want list to several dealers at once or attempt to circulate its requests at intervals? How should it evaluate the quotations it receives? Should it reject any? If so, on what basis? How should it select the dealers it uses? Recently, Frederick Altman and Domi- nick Coppola, speaking as dealers, stressed the importance of mutual respect and close cooperation between dealers and librarians.It is particularly impor- tant that a search librarian who has de- cided to utilize dealers in securing his wants recognize that he is entering into a cooperative venture which must serve the needs of both parties in order to suc- ceed. Furthermore, he must understand what those needs are. The librarian wants to acquire as many books as pos- sible, as quickly as possible, within the limits of his budget. The dealer wants to make a fair profit, to have most of his quotations accepted, not to be pitted against his fellow dealers, and to secure prompt payment. One of the complaints most frequently voiced by search dealers about libraries is that they "broadcast" their wants. That is, they send the same want list to a number of dealers at the same time. This places the dealers in direct compe- tition with each other, leads to a rise in 8 G u y R . L y l e , The Administration of the College Library ( N e w Y o r k : H. W . W i l s o n C o . , 1 9 6 1 ) , p . 2 5 5 . T h i s p r e f e r e n c e for a s i n g l e d e a l e r h a s b e e n e c h o e d r e c e n t l y b y J o s e p h L . T r e y z in " T h e O P M a r k e t , " Choice, I I ( J u l y - A u g u s t 1 9 6 5 ) , 2 8 3 - 8 4 . 9 D o m i n i c k C o p p o l a , " T h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l B o o k s e l l e r L o o k s a t A c q u i s i t i o n s , " a n d F r e d e r i c k A l t m a n , " T h e A n t i q u a r i a n R e p r i n t D e a l e r L o o k s at A c q u i s i t i o n s , " Library Resources and Technical Services, X I ( S p r i n g 1 9 6 7 ) , 2 0 3 - 1 0 . Out-of-Print Booksearching / 305 prices, and results in the rejection of many legitimate offers (only the first or cheapest is accepted, unless multiple copies are wanted). Most search dealers are unwilling to invest time, money, and effort on behalf of libraries which follow this procedure. On the other hand, it is quite under- standable that a search librarian should be reluctant to send a want to only one dealer and leave it with him indefinite- ly, whether he finds it or not. No matter how successful a dealer may be, he is going to locate only a percentage of any group of wants, and sooner or later he will turn his attention from the hard-to- get items to concentrate on the newer requests that continue to come to him. Yet many of those books that he has been unable to locate may be needed urgently by the library. The answer that the UCB search di- vision has found to this problem is to send each desideratum to only one deal- er at a time, but send it on to other deal- ers at specified intervals. These inter- vals must be long enough to provide ade- quate search time for each dealer but not so long as to allow extended dor- mant periods, when the book is not being actively sought. In an effort to determine the optimal duration of such intervals, the search di- vision analyzed a random sample of 746 titles purchased during 1963-64. The study showed that a majority of these items were quoted by dealers less than two and one-half months after they re- ceived the library's request, and that 90 per cent were quoted within less than six months. On the basis of this study, the division decided to circulate its- wants at regular six-month intervals. Fortunately, the established routines of the UCB search division were such that the new procedures could be insti- tuted with a minimum of reorganization. It had been the division's practice to 306 / College b- Research Libraries • March 1968 review its desiderata files completely every two years. The cards listing the bibliographical information for each item, which have a record of its search history (the dealers who have been contacted) on the back, were examined and the next dealer to be contacted was assigned. The bibliographical section of the card was photographed in a frame which gave the library's name and ad- dress and information to the dealer on quoting procedures. This was, of course, done in groups, and these groups of photostats were sent to the various as- signed dealers. The dealer's name was noted on the back of each bibliographi- cal card, and that card was refiled in the desiderata file, awaiting a quotation or the next review. When the division decided to circulate its wants on a six-month basis, it recog- nized that the desiderata file (contain- ing approximately thirty thousand items) could not be reviewed this frequently. The obvious solution was multiple as- signment: decide on several dealers at each review. This is the procedure that is presently being followed. Each day, all new wants and a portion of older wants from the desiderata file are ex- amined. Three dealers are assigned for each and three request slips are photo- graphed, but only the first slip is mailed. The others are postdated by six months and one year, and they are filed under those dates in a special file. Since this practice was initiated, a substantial num- ber of postdated slips have accumulated in this file. Each day, the slips filed under that date are removed, added to slips which have just been photographed, and mailed to dealers. The assigned deal- ers were noted on the postdated slips before they were filed, and all three dealers and their respective mailing dates were noted on the back of each bibliographical card at the time of as- signment. When a quotation is received from a dealer, the back of the biblio- graphical card is checked before the order is placed and any postdated slips requesting a quotation on that book which are still in the files are removed and destroyed. Complicated though this may sound, it has been reduced to a matter of strict routine and functions very quickly and smoothly. The division decided to assign three dealers at each review—rather than, say, four or five—for several reasons. First, it was hoped that the desiderata file could be completely reviewed every eighteen months, and a triple assignment at six-month intervals would coincide perfectly. Second, it was felt that the file should be reviewed as frequently as possible, since this review also provides an opportunity to consider the utility of further search, the possibility of photo- copy, and other alternatives. Finally, the dealer situation is constantly changing, and the division decided that it should not commit itself to specific dealers farther ahead than was necessary to guarantee the continual circulation of its wants. Even under the present practice, some slips have to be reassigned when their mailing date comes up because the dealer who was originally chosen has gone out of business or has proved un- satisfactory. The success of this procedure can be seen from a recent study of the search division's orders. Of 601 orders currently outstanding on September 13, 1967, 193 were quoted by the first dealer con- tacted, 182 by the second dealer, 122 by the third dealer, 62 by the fourth dealer, and 42 by fifth through twelfth dealers. This indicates that a frequent turnover of dealers will yield a high return at least through the third dealer contacted. While the perceptible drop in response after the third dealer seems to suggest that searching should be discontinued at this point, some mitigating factors have to be considered. This procedure was instituted less than three years ago. Out-of-Print Booksearching / 307 Although the preassignment system has worked quite well, assuring that each item reviewed will go out to three dealers within an eighteen-month period, it has not been possible to review the desiderata file every eighteen months. Consequently, many fewer requests have gone to four or more dealers than have been sent to three dealers during this period—most of the items in the study group had been assigned to three deal- ers only. It is inevitable, therefore, that a preponderance of the replies should have come from the first three dealers. Most of the search dealers utilized by the UCB search division have been quite satisfied with the six-month semi-exclu- sive period provided under the present systemHowever, it has caused a rise in the percentage of rejections to the few who continue searching actively for more than six months. Even in these cases, the division has been able to keep its rejections to 5 per cent or less of the items offered (approximately another 5 per cent are refused due to price, con- dition, variant edition, the receipt of gifts, the return of lost copies, etc.).10 When dealers are troubled by this figure, the division has learned that a frank ex- planation of its procedures and its own willingness to extend the exclusive pe- riod in exceptional cases has usually worked out well for the dealer and li- brary. Another difficult problem for the search librarian is the evaluation of deal- ers' quotations. This lies right at the heart of the librarian's difficult position between the dealer's requirements and the library's interests. Should the li- brarian lean in one direction and ac- cept all quotations, regardless of price, or should he lean the other way and scrutinize all quotations closely? 1 0 T h i s s e c o n d figure is a n o v e r - a l l a v e r a g e . W i t h a f e w d e a l e r s , w h o offer m a n y v a r i a n t s o r w h o d e a l i n v e r y e x p e n s i v e m a t e r i a l s , t h e p e r c e n t a g e o f r e f u s a l s o m e t i m e s b e c o m e s u n f o r t u n a t e l y h i g h . As a general principle, it is probably best to reject very few quotations. After all, it is difficult to obtain the kind of price information that allows for a fair evaluation of a quotation. The prices that are readily available are largely sell- er's prices, taken from catalog listings, and are not particularly applicable to out-of-print searching, where a dealer has been requested to invest time and money uncovering a specific title. No search librarian can tell how much this investment is in any given case. More- over, if a library requests a dealer to ob- tain a book and then rejects his offer, the dealer is not only out whatever he has invested in searching but also the price of the book if he has already se- cured it. When a library begins to reject a large percentage of his offers, a dealer is likely to turn to other customers. This, of course, will defeat the library's entire purpose. Certainly, this does not mean that a library is required to accept all offers. Expensive quotations—say $25.00 and up —demand some evaluation and even sub- stantiation, and dealers should appre- ciate this. On the whole, however, the search librarian must find other means than the rejection of specific offers to insure that his library gets its money's worth. The means worked out by the UCB search division is a semi-annual review „ of dealers' prices. This has been made practical by the fact that the division's regular order procedure involves the use of IBM card records. An extra sta- tistics card is punched at the time of order and filed away. At six-month in- tervals, these cards are removed from the file and run by dealer. The dealer groups are reviewed and average prices computed. These average prices are then compared—art book dealers with art book dealers, general American dealers with general American dealers, Slavic- dealers with Slavic dealers. On the basis 308 / College b- Research Libraries • March 1968 of these comparisons, the division is able to channel its requests to the least expensive dealers, and to secure its desiderata at the best available prices. This evaluation has proved much more reliable than the previous subjec- tive approach, which was based solely on daily impressions of quotations. Un- der this latter system, one or two ex- pensive offers can unduly overbalance a number of inexpensive ones. Further- more, it provided no basis for an ac- curate comparison of competitive deal- ers. The IBM statistical file has also been used by the search division to compute dealer response. The division keeps a running tally of requests submitted to each of its dealers. When the statistics cards are reviewed every six months, the amount of response is totaled and compared with the number of requests sent out during the same interval. On the basis of this comparison, a percent- age of response is computed for each dealer. As with price averages, response percentages of similar dealers only, are compared. The differences among these dealers is enormous. For example, the response of general American dealers between December 1, 1966, and May 30, 1967, ranged from a high of 33 per cent to a low of 3 per cent. The average response of all such dealers was 24 per cent. Before this evaluation was instituted, two years ago, response, like cost, was a matter of subjective impression, and was characterized by the same weak- nesses. A large batch of offers, received occasionally, from one dealer might overbalance the more frequent return of a few at a time from another—although the latter might send in both a greater volume and a higher percentage. Now the division is better able to channel its requests to those dealers who are most likely to respond. Of course, the search librarian of a large library, with a sizable desiderata file, needs a good many dealers if he is going to turn over his file regularly. This means that he must continue to develop new dealers, and that he must give them ample opportunity to demonstrate their abilities before ceasing to use them. He should try each one over a period of several months, with as great a variety of desiderata as the dealer's interests and the library's needs allow. Also, each dealer should be given a fair share of new items—material just referred to search and being sent out for the first time—as well as older wants which have been sent out to many dealers. It is not fair to any dealer—except, perhaps, the very expensive ones—to send him only requests for material that has already been searched extensively. • Finally, something should be said about the utilization of specialist as op- posed to general dealers. As a rule, spe- cialists seem to charge more for an equivalent book, and a good general search service can cover most of the specialties. On the other hand, the UCB search division has found that special- ists should not be overlooked. It has had considerable success with dealers who limit themselves to criminology, econom- ics, international relations, and natural science. Fields such as art, music, and documents seem almost to demand spe- cialization. The question as to whether or not a library should advertise its wants has been left until the last, as this is a rather unique problem. A library with a very small desiderata file may find this ap- proach best, as it circulates wants to a large group of prospective suppliers at the same time without committing the library to purchase. After all, none of these dealers is being asked to search. He simply reviews his stock and quotes by postcard. If his quotation is refused, he has lost very little. In this way, a library which cannot invest a substantial Out-of-Print Booksearching / 309 portion of labor time searching is able to reach a maximum of potential sources. While it has been suggested that ad- vertising may increase the cost of de- siderata, the investigations of the UCB search division have shown that this does not seem to b e the case. 1 1 The use that a large library, with an extensive desiderata file, can make of such media as TAAB is quite limited. If thousands of books are being sought, ob- viously only a small portion can be list- ed. Therefore, such advertising must be quite selective. The UCB search division has based its selection on two principles. First, it advertises for material that is urgently needed for course reserve. Second, it advertises for items that its 1 1 This opinion is mentioned by Robert W . Evans, " T h e OP M a r k e t , " Choice, I I (July-August 1 9 6 5 ) , 2 8 5 . A study by the U C B search division found that the average price of a book secured through a TAAB advertisement was about 2 per cent less than the average price of similar books secured through quo- tation. regular dealers are not supplying. For example, the division was having diffi- culty locating anthropology books. It began to list them in TAAB. As a result, it not only obtained material that its normal suppliers were unable to locate, but also heard from dealers who special- ize in this field. Some of these dealers have been contacted about searching and have responded. In this way, adver- tising has proved to be an excellent means of uncovering new dealers. Out-of-print searching can be an at- tractive speciality for librarians. It is an important and interesting area of library acquisition activity. It brings the librarian into close and continuing con- tact with the antiquarian book trade. It enables him to play a unique and sig- nificant role in the development of his library's collection. Finally, with the need to discover new procedures and re- fine old ones, it enables him to contrib- ute to his profession. • •