Exchange and purchase of library documents today

Trends in National Library of the Czech Republic in the beginning of the millennium

Mgr. Světlana Knollová, Head of the Foreign Acquisitions Dept., National Library of the Czech Republic

The mission of the National Library of the Czech Republic in foreign literature acquisitions is to become the main information and documentary centre in humanities, natural and social sciences, culture and arts. The collections of the National Library serve the readers on undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

In the National Library of the Czech Republic, there are other two autonomous entities with their own acquisitions and processing: the Slavonic Library[1] and a special library of documents from the area of library science. Altogether, our library has ca. 6 million volumes.

The periodicals - legal deposit included - are acquired directly by the Periodical Department, which is rather independent, because of not being included in any other higher division. The only exceptions from this rule are foreign exchanges of periodicals that are administered by the Foreign Acquisition Department.

The foreign publications are acquired to the National Library through purchase, exchange, and donation. The foreign acquisitions are based on the National Library collection development policy using Conspectus model. The concrete Conspectus application for the collections of the National Library of the Czech Republic is accessible from the URL http://konspekt.nkp.cz

According to the National Library collection building policy, the majority of the Conspectus subject categories should be covered in much detail that is expressed by the indicator 4 designating research level and by the language code W (wide selection of languages).

However, the financial situation in the National Library is far to be optimal; therefore, nowadays, we are not able to satisfy the readers' needs nor to comply with the agreed goals of the library collection building policy. The largest part of our acquisition activities is financed from a special state grant and the acquisition share of the regular National Library budget is very small. Unfortunately, during the last years, the amount of available funding has decreased, while the cost of acquired documents has been going in the opposite direction. It results that the purchase of the foreign literature suffers by lack of financial means.

As the book prices, subscriptions, and postage have been constantly growing, the proportion of purchase in the foreign acquisition has fallen down on only 20% in the last years.

We acquire through purchase especially foreign publications about Czech Republic, Czech culture, and sciences; books of Czech authors and works about them published throughout the world; materials in Czech language published in other countries; foreign reference books specialized in humanities, natural and social sciences; fundamental works of different disciplines in foreign languages; foreign bibliographic databases on CD-ROM; subscription of access to bibliographic and publishers' databases.

In most cases, we purchase the production from foreign publishing houses through Czech suppliers (for instance, Intes, Mega Books, Signet, and others). This way is simpler than direct purchase from foreign publishers. According to existing laws, we can pay the invoices only after delivery of publications. Czech suppliers declare books at customs, carry the risk in case of non-delivery of parcels, and handle the claiming agenda, but the delivery periods are longer. Furthermore, suppliers' expenses and VAT are not just low for our budget. In the Czech Republic, the value added tax for books is 5%, while for CD-ROMs 22%.

The direct purchase from foreign publishers or suppliers is much more time-consuming, but there are possibilities to obtain special discounts offered to libraries; the delivery period is usually not so long. In this case, we apply the decree no. 247/2002 Coll. of the Ministry of Finance about duty-free import of goods for educational purposes.

By purchase, we acquire titles from USA and Western Europe. In these countries, there are the large book markets and it is rather easy to have information about new titles either from paper catalogues or via electronic media. In addition, several publishers offer special prices to libraries; therefore, we try to ask vendors to respect these publisher policies and reduce prices.

In the recent decade, the worldwide publishing policy acquired a very specific character. There was a merge of independent publishing houses into huge corporations. Such corporations are usually not too stable or reliable and after some time they disintegrate, while the participating publishers associate into other supra-national complexes, which can control the pricing policy in even larger regions than they were able to do before.

Often, they have their own suppliers for every region or they have agreements with selected national suppliers. For acquisition librarians, who must have negotiation skills, this situation is not so easy to monitor. It may happen that orders, which were sent to a publisher, arrived to another new established complex. It may also happen that during the organizational transformation of the publishing scene, the orders fall away: this is risky especially in case of serial or multivolume publications that are issued on continuation.

Purchase from the Central and Eastern European countries and from non-European countries (without USA) is much limited. In some cases, there is no way to find information about new titles on the book market in these countries. Publishing of the paper catalogues is not regular, while electronic information is rare and insufficient. Neither it is easy to find solid vendors there. With a few exceptions, agents and suppliers in this area offer prices, which are several times higher than the real value of the publication is. The postage and packing expanses are also very high. I thing there is not fair and business-like to offer such services to libraries. We would welcome that the academic publishers in Eastern Europe have their proper distribution services operating under standard business terms. We are very interested in production of the Eastern Europe Universities and Departments of Academies of Sciences, such publishing as Russian Nauka, Romanian Ştiinţa, or Slovakian Veda. It would be preferable for us to communicate directly with them.

In conformity with existing laws, Czech libraries can pay invoices only after the delivery of publications. Unluckily, not all publishers respect this rule and require the payment per advance. In this case we cannot collaborate with them.

For that reason, exchange has been effective source for acquisitions from Eastern Europe and non-European countries. The exchange also continues to be supplemental method for our National Library in the acquisition from some Western libraries.

Until the 1990s, it was the main method to acquire foreign literature for collections in the Czech Republic. Thanks to our exchange partners, we used to manage to obtain important materials from Western publishing houses. Thanks to our archiving function that gave us right to do it, we were also able to acquire such publications, which were not available through official channels.

During the time, the share of foreign publications acquired through exchange has declined. Nevertheless, it is still quite high: in 2002, it was 47% for books and about 50% for serials. With partners from Eastern European countries, our exchange contacts are based on item-for-item platform, while with Western partners they are based on equal amounts of money spent in both budgets.

It appears that exchanges between institutions in Eastern European and non-European countries will have a future, at least in the next three or five years. This collaboration, based on the item-for-item scheme, is not as time-consuming as the exchange based on money. Our contacts are financially profitable for both sides. Through exchange, we acquire, among others, publications from China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan. Scholars from the Institute of the Far East at the Charles University help us with their proposals, selection, and transliteration of the literature in non-Latin alphabets. Thanks to long and traditional co-operation with this institute, our collection of sinology, for instance, is much appreciated by specialists, while to get such publications by purchase seems to be impossible. The financial advantages of these exchanges are obvious. We cannot and we do not want to stop them, because they are a valuable and convenient source of scientific material.

We have also very good contacts with Russian institutions such as Russian State Library, Russian National Library, or State Library of the Foreign Literature. Our collaboration concerns both books and periodicals.

Other good examples of co-operation are our exchanges with several Romanian institutions in Bucharest. In this case the exchanges are the only acquisition source of Romanian literature for our library. Our main partner in the area is Romanian National Library from where we receive the majority of Romanian books and periodicals. A similar situation is in our exchanges with Hungarian libraries. Such collaborative agreements are not large, because the number of users able to read in Czech is limited in these countries and vice versa, but such contacts are important and necessary for both sides.

Concerning the acquisitions documents published by Western publishers, we have a lot of information about the book market in this area. There is no problem for us to find out almost any desired title and to order it directly or from our Czech supplier; therefore in this case, exchanges with institutions from Western Europe and USA are interesting for us especially as to their financial aspects, but they are much more time-consuming because of comprehensive accounting of spent money. Unluckily, not every partner evaluates our common balance regularly, especially as to subscription of periodicals the price of which increases considerably every year. Sometimes, there are also problems with communication. Unhappily, exchanges are the area in which there is a big fluctuation of staff: in much more cases younger librarians have no endurance to follow this agenda accurately; therefore, the continuity of relations between partners may get lost.

Our exchange partners are able to provide us with ordered titles cheaper, while we supply them - in addition to current Czech books and serials - with the materials, which are not commercially available as, for example, regional publications, limited editions, conference proceedings, copies of out-of-print materials, etc. For some Western institutions, which have no experts knowledgeable in Czech language, we make selections from information about new titles appearing on the Czech book market, while keeping in view their acquisition profiles.

Such activities are time-consuming, but for the present, we still do them for our reliable partners.

Another problem is that suppliers - who ensure purchase and send ordered titles for exchange partners - are not always able to guarantee this work. Some partners of ours have complained that their suppliers do not process orders in due time and thus they cannot be considered as reliable. The exchange agenda has really many problems. In these cases, it is too much dependent on the changing scene in the book trade area and unreliability of a considerable number of vendors.

Nevertheless, the collaboration with some exchange partners is traditionally solid and smooth. We would like to continue to keep and amplify such relations, which are profitable for each other. Traditionally, this character of co-operation is characteristic for mostly for our contacts with German and Austrian partners and with some American Universities Libraries.

In general, exchanges are alive and bilaterally profitable if good personal contacts between exchange librarians still exist.

On this occasion, it is important to mention the positive impact of the electronic environment on operating the acquisition procedures. Almost our entire correspondence runs via electronic mail and the questions, which remained unanswered before for a long time, are now resolved quickly within a few days or hours. The majority of orders are sent to suppliers and exchange partners electronically. Information sources are shown on the websites with fast searching capabilities. The exchange lists or files of duplicates are available on library websites or such files can be e-mailed. The lists of new acquired titles are updated every month by subject groups on our acquisition sites. All this helps us in our work, but it makes us also dependent on the network, energy supply, and quality of operation of the library system.

The reasons why exchanges are for us - and probably for our partners, too - a good choice for acquisition of foreign documents are that we can get the necessary materials more cheaply, acquire grey literature unavailable by purchase as well as out-of-print copies, and to amplify contacts between librarians and libraries. Of course, we also would like to promote Czech culture through Czech publishing production abroad.

For well functioning exchanges, it is necessary to have good personal contacts with exchange partners and to be flexible in communication with them. Partners must be reliable, there should be benefit for both sites, and there must be a budget for exchanges and essential support of the library top management.

Since 1996, we have been using the acquisition module of the ALEPH library system. The system enables maintaining files of ordered titles, budgets, vendors, and invoices. The full acquisition processing is applied to the documents acquired through purchase; for titles, which come via exchanges, this processing does not include generation of invoices, while in case of gifts or exchange of titles without previous orders we do not use the acquisition module at all. In this latter case, the records for the new titles are created and processed directly in the cataloguing module.

Here, we would like to emphasize the importance of the perfect functioning of the library system and thoughtful testing and tuning of the new versions and patches before their implementation.

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[1] The Slavonic Library started to use the international exchange of publications for acquisition purposes in an increased manner in 1950s. The new exchange agreements were partly built on the pre-war relations and they established a network of reliable partners with whom the Slavonic Library has been co-operating until today. In spite of high share of publications acquired through exchange - ca. 50% - this acquisition method is very dependent on political, social, and economical changes in the world as, for example, disintegration of the USSR, war in Yugoslavia, decrease of Western interest in the East European studies, etc.