*/LCCN/**, August 28, 2012*
**
*A day in the life of Bob Dardano, Acquisitions Librarian*
*By Bob Dardano*
**
Today's article is the first of a two-part guest post by Robert Dardano,
Acquisitions Specialist in the Benelux, France and Italy section of ABA.
For an additional mention of Robert and his work, see
http://blogs.loc.gov/law/2012/06/update-on-medieval-canon-law-and-how-to-deal-with-a-complex-book/
**
*Acquisitions Librarian*
*Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate*
*African, Latin American and Western European Division***
*Benelux, France and Italy Section*
My job as an acquisitions librarian includes many varied tasks. Boredom
is not a problem. Each day I can do a little of this and a little of
that, going back and forth between different types of work.
Usually, the first thing I do every day is to check and read through
incoming e-mail. Since my job is to acquire material from Italy for the
collections, I often find messages from my Italian vendor, Casalini
Libri, or from other Italian sources in my in-box first thing in the
morning. These are usually replies to e-mail queries I may have sent the
afternoon or day before. Today there were four e-mails from Casalini
among the rest to check. I read them and will get back to work on them
later in the day.
Next I opened some packages from Casalini. As our approval plan dealer
for Italy, Vatican City, and San Marino, Casalini has formal contracts
with us to provide books for the General Collections and the Law Library
on a regular basis. They also provide material for the Special
Collections if we order it from them. Each year we send them a profile
of the kinds of material we want--subjects, formats, etc.--and they
select commercially-published material to send us within the limits of
our budget. Today there were eight boxes to open. One box contained
books for the Law Library; the rest contained books for the General
Collections. This part of the job can be fairly labor intensive. It
requires moving packages around, opening them, and putting the material
on book trucks or on shelves. Often I find myself kneeling on the floor
to do this, as I did today. I find this is slightly more comfortable
and easier on my back than bending over from a standing position to pick
up books. However, crawling around on the floor has put holes in the
knees of several pairs of jeans over the years, not to mention the wear
and tear on pairs of shoes and sneakers.
Some of the packages today contained books for the Casalini "shelf
ready" project. About half of the books we receive from Casalini come
shelf ready, which means (just as it sounds) that the books are ready to
go directly to the shelf. They have already been cataloged and prepared
for the shelves with security stripping, edge stamping, and labeling
done by Casalini staff. These books have to be processed differently
from the other books we receive where LC staffers do the cataloging and
book preparation. ABA has shelf ready projects with only a few vendors
in the world, so this workflow is unusual. I have to deal with these
books in a separate workflow.
I already had a truck full of non-shelf ready General Collections books
from last week to work on, so I turned my attention in that direction.
We put books on a truck invoice-by-invoice. Each Casalini invoice lists
books of only one type, e.g., current monographs (published within the
last five years), multi-part monographs where we have received some
volumes before and have established purchase orders, new multi-part
monographs, monographic series, sample periodicals, and non-current
material (older than five years). Serials for which we already have
subscription orders arrive separately. Books for the Law Library are
sent separately from books for the General Collections. The books are
sorted this way because different funds pay for different kinds of
books. I have to check every book to verify the following: (1) that it
is listed on the invoice that came with the shipment; (2) that it is
published in Italy, Vatican City, or San Marino; (3) that it is
appropriate to the kind of invoice (fund and book type) on which it is
listed; and (4) that it conforms to the profile we sent Casalini at the
beginning of the fiscal year and to the LC collections policy
statements, or that it is in response to a specific purchase order we
placed. If books do not meet these criteria, I need to do some
investigating or make appropriate annotations to the invoice. We might
even return the offending book(s) to Casalini. I check the books off on
the invoice and then total up the number of pieces we are paying for.
In short, I need to verify that we're receiving what we want, and that
we're paying for what we receive and we're receiving what we pay for. I
also prioritize the books for cataloging and add any appropriate routing
slips, e.g., assigning the book to Music Division or Geography and Map
Division for cataloging, or routing the book for review by a
recommending officer. It can take a number of hours to process a truck
of incoming books. Thankfully, there were no problems or anomalies with
any of the books I worked on today.
To be continued: what happens after lunch?
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