Re: Haworth TSANDERS@AUDUCVAX.BITNET 11 Apr 1991 13:53 UTC
I would add to the prior comments that Haworth is not alone in a) direct billing for titles purchased through vendors or b) delaying publications but continuing to bill regularly, thus creating (if possible) a situation where the library may be twoor more years ahead in payments. A large percentage of the titles we buy through vendors also result in our getting renewal notices and bills through the mail--often down to third notices and final notices for items which the vendor claims to have paid months ago. Then it comes down to who you believe most. (Also to a lot of frantic telephone calls.) We coul d save considerable staff time if we didn't have to cope this this flood of false invoices, but the publishers claim it is too difficult to write and install the simple computer programs which would distinguish between recipient-paid and vendor-paid subscritptions. (for the small guys, this may be true). Just as it is too expensive to clean mailing lists, so that we end up getting 20-30 copies of the same ad in the same days mail. I think most of us are familiar with at least one well known publkisher, now infiltrating the Russian publishing scene, who frequently bill years ahead of publication. I sus suppose that this one source of their great profits.And we have had a great deal of problems with a vendor other than Faxon--Stevens and Brown--in the past few years, in terms of our paying in the autumn and reaching the first of the year and the publishing house claiming not to have been paid and refusing to supply. We've even had long distance telephone calls from English publishers about this. We have also had an increase lately in the problem of our not being billed for renewals, most often by publishers but sometimes by certain less-autoimated vendors, and our failing to catch this because we have not got an action date set on NOTIS for "EXPECT BILL". I am afraid this is all part of doing business. We are suspicious of every incoming invoice until it has proved out, but we still get caught sometimes by new vendors we haven't dealt with suddenly contacting us and asking payment as the only N.A. source (only to later get a bill from our overseas source), having journals sold from one publisher to abo another and having the new publisher claim ourname is not on the list of subscribers (even though we can prove we paid,we may never get soeme of the issues), paying for titles that are "delayed" only to see no further issues published, etc. The publishers and vendors have to deal with the problems we cause, the strange billing requirements some of our administrations require, etc., so I suppose it may even out in the end, but i t can be frustrating, especially when you have a patron standing at your desk and totally failing to understand why you, the librarian he/she looks down on but relies on (like the fast-food help) has failed to produce an issue he/she knows for a fact has been received at another library where his/her fi firend does research. After all these years I have still not figured out how some people get the cheek to ads disguised as renewal notices, ads which promise faculty members discounts on personal subscriptions if they pressure the library into subscribing at a vastly inflated institutional rate (We'll drop your subscription cost from $40 to $35 if you convince your library to shell out $210 a year for an institutional subscription no one has requested in our 17 years of publication), etc. I guess that is why I am in the public sector, rather than the private. Thomas Sanders, Serials, Auburn University, AL (tsanders@auducvax)