[Evergreen-catalogers] Acquisitions question: how do you handle orders from Amazon?

[Danielle Davis]

Hi Jane,

At York County Library System in P.A., we only order items that are not available through our primary or secondary vendors (Baker & Taylor and Ingram) through Amazon.  Most of our high demand releases arrive from these vendors through our standing order programs a bit before the release date, so our Amazon orders usually consist of Self-Pub/Local Author titles and patron requests.  Because the turnaround is so fast (we have Amazon Prime), we don't bother to put on order records ahead of time for these.  The staff in charge of item records will usually place any patron holds at the time that they add the item.  In most other instances, we do put on order records ahead of time for our firm and standing orders.  

If you don't order a lot of pre-pubs from Amazon and most items are in stock, this may be the way to go.  Before we had Amazon Prime (and Evergreen!), we would usually just create a very basic brief record for the item using original cataloging, which included the title in all caps (so it was easy for Tech Services staff to spot) and the ISBN.  But again, we have never ordered the majority of our books from Amazon.

If you have access to bib records from an outside source, you could just upload them to a PO on a non-EDI account and add order records to the items as well.

I hope this helps!  Let me know if you have any more questions.

Best,

Danielle


Danielle M. Davis
Technical Services Librarian
Acquisitions, Metadata & Original Cataloging
York County Library System
717-849-6972
ddavis at yorklibraries.org



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-----Original Message-----
From: Evergreen-catalogers [mailto:evergreen-catalogers-bounces at list.evergreen-ils.org] On Behalf Of Jane Sandberg
Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2016 5:22 PM
To: Evergreen Discussion Group <open-ils-general at list.georgialibraries.org>; Evergreen Community Catalogers <evergreen-catalogers at list.evergreen-ils.org>
Subject: [Evergreen-catalogers] Acquisitions question: how do you handle orders from Amazon?

Hi colleagues,

We're thinking about how we want to approach on-order records from Amazon, and wanted to know how you approached this in your own libraries.  We had a few ideas:

1) Just wait on creating POs until the Amazon orders actually arrive.
This doesn't give patrons the chance to put holds on items before they are received.

2) Just type out the brief order records when the order is placed, which seems time consuming.

3) Also when the order is placed, use the Acquisitions MARC Federated Search, and if nothing shows up, then type the brief order records, which also seems time consuming.

4) Be sad that the chopac Amazon2Marc converter went away [1]

How do y'all handle this?  I'm particularly interested in hearing about how your workflow works for your cataloging/acquisitions staff and how it looks to patrons using the catalog.

Thanks in advance,

  -Jane


[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20160319050314/http://chopac.org/az2marc_goodbye.html

--
Jane Sandberg
Electronic Resources Librarian
Linn-Benton Community College
sandbej at linnbenton.edu / 541-917-4655
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