Gordon and Breach (again) (Steve Murden) Marcia Tuttle 15 Aug 1995 18:01 UTC
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 15 Aug 1995 13:02:33 -0400 From: Steve Murden <SMURDEN@GEMS.VCU.EDU> Subject: Gordon and Breach (again) I have several questions relating to how Gordon and Breach is doing business, specially in the States. I am very interested in knowing if anyone else has any clarifying information, since contacting them is so difficult. We have the following address in the US, taken from their invoices: International Publishers Distributor Pte., Ltd. P. O. Box 27542 Newwark, NJ 07101-8742 Directory assistance has no listing for a phone number, but we would like to have a local contact number. I am hard-pressed to justify the expense of trans-Atlantic calls, or even faxes. Can anybody help? When G&B stopped dealing with Faxon (our contracted periodicals vendor), we transferred all their titles to Direct. They later moved the business to IPD (as I recall). For invoices above a certain amount, we are required, by law, to deal only with contracted vendors. If a company does not work through vendors, we have to obtain a Sole Source letter from them, stating that they are the exclusive source for certain items, and that letter must accompany every invoice that we process from them. (Yes, it's complicated, but they are the rules that we have to work under.) G&B has recently informed us, via fax, that they _will_ deal with vendors. I have not yet called our Faxon rep. to see if their working relationship with G&B has changed; I thought that I would begin by lumping all of my questions in one posting here first. If anyone has any current information in that regard, I would love to hear about it. My final huge concern is with the following note that appears on several of their invoices this year: The Subscription price includes an additional 10% charge for a CD-ROM that will include all of the material contained in the printed Journal and may include visual enhancements such as video images and other material. We do not _want_ the CDs, and do not want to pay for them. We generally exercise the option of crossing items off of invoices and paying only for what we specifically request, but are reluctant to do that in this case. We could find ourselves out 90% of the invoice amount, but with no subscription to show for it. Has anyone had any conversations about this issue with genuine G&B staff? Is this an optional or a required _enhancement_? I continue to advocate with our Collection Management librarians for the cancellation of all G&B titles, and have done so for several years now. Unfortunately, they are more concerned with the integrity of the research collection than they are with the difficulties that we face in Acquisitions. (And before anybody flames me, that is not a slam; I would expect nothing less from them.) I almost hate to start another Gordon and Breach thread on this list, but I suspect that we are not the only library dealing with these problems/issues. If anyone has any information that would help to enlighten me, they can either post it to the List or send it directly to me. If the latter includes salient comments that might be of general interest, I will gladly repost a synposis of any private messages I receive. Thanks. Steve Murden Virginia Commonwealth University smurden@gems.vcu.edu