Development Librarian Collection – The Challenge of Acquiring Conference Proceedings

How many times have you heard the statement, “Cut out the middleman and you’ll save money”? As consumers, we all want a better deal… and as a manufacturer (or publisher in this case), you would want the same because you could earn more, have more control, and be directly connected to the consumer. In the case of conference proceedings, a highly specialized publication full of scientific articles presented at professional meetings, the model becomes a bit more complicated.

To build a broad and deep collection of proceedings, the consumer (a collection development librarian or subject librarian) has literally thousands of publishers (professional society publishers and scientific publishers) to choose from. While it’s great to have options, the task of searching, reviewing, and acquiring minutes from so many publishers is daunting. Taking a closer look reveals even more obstacles to overcome.

1. The top tier of professional societies have paid staff and can handle inquiries and orders. However, most societies that produce minutes have limited staff or are run by volunteer engineers in academia and industry. This makes the acquisition process even more cumbersome as they are often not set up as a “for-profit” business and have other priorities.
2. Contacting hundreds of publishers to create a collection of proceedings may not be practical, especially when most of these publishers are understaffed or understaffed. Unless, of course, you have nothing better to do than spend the day Googling conference chairs and their emails or faxes and phone numbers.
3. Society meetings are held on different dates each year, so publication dates are uncertain.
4. Some society meetings plan to publish minutes, but for a variety of reasons publication may be delayed for months or even years, or may be canceled altogether.
5. Since minute editors are located all over the world, many editors are sleeping when you are awake and there can be language and currency issues.

There may be many other obstacles, but it would be safe to say that finding a good dealer could be beneficial. Better yet, finding a “specialized conference proceedings company” that has a history of supplying a variety of proceedings to libraries can provide the best value for money.

A good distributor will be able to compile a list of titles from many publishers with pricing and availability information included. They may be able to provide more specialized services, such as handling certain recurring conference titles on a standing order. They may even be able to sort titles or publishers by subject area. For example:

• aerospace conference proceedings
• Proceedings of conferences on electricity and computing
• Chemistry and Petroleum Conference Proceedings
• nanotechnology conference proceedings
• biology and medicine conference proceedings

This can make the librarian’s job much easier. Instead of spending countless hours searching the web for titles in specific subject areas, only so you can begin the arduous task of contacting dozens or hundreds of publishers: imagine you have new title information, sorted by publisher or subject, offered to you on a monthly basis. After going through the list and choosing the titles you want, you can place your order and let them do the rest.

For the same reasons that a central market or grocery store is more convenient than driving all over town to pick up a variety of groceries and other staples, a good conference proceedings vendor can be worth their weight in gold. Given the price of gold these days, that’s pretty valuable.