by Ramona McKeown

Staying current with the latest publications in the book world has gotten easier for Baylor faculty.  Taking advantage of an alert service available through the library, faculty can now receive a message in their e-mail providing a link to a list of new books published in their subject areas.

In 2007, faculty representatives in every department met with Baylor librarians and Yankee Book Peddler (YBP) staff to set up a profile with YBP, specifying the areas of interest for teaching and research.  Staff at YBP examine thousands of books each year from hundreds of publishers; they assign subject codes and content levels to each book.  As books are published that meet Baylor’s “profile,” they are flagged in YBP’s online database, GOBI (Global Online Bibliographic Information).  In some subjects, books are sent automatically to the library “on approval;” others are designated for notification.

Each department has a librarian with responsibility for serving as consultant to the faculty for collection development purposes.  The librarians create the alert profiles for individual faculty members to receive the notifications of interest to them.  Options in the alert profile specify whether the alert is received once a week, once every two weeks or once every four weeks.

The alerts are generated by YBP every Saturday morning and appear in the faculty member’s e-mail Inbox.  Some departments funnel all of their requests through a single faculty member; others choose to let each faculty member have his/her own alert and recommend titles directly to the library.

“Since we typically request only a small percentage of the books suggested by Gobi, I email the list to the rest of the department (a process taking less than a minute), then faculty can recommend selections to me,” said Greg Speegle, associate professor of computer science. “With only two clicks of a mouse, the recommended selections are set to be ordered.”

It is very easy to go through the title list and mark items of interest.  A click on the “Recommend” button sends each faculty member’s list of recommendations to a shared space on the Gobi server where the librarians can in turn review them, check for duplicate recommendations and pass on to the Acquisitions staff for purchase.  Acquisitions uses the same electronic record to notify YBP that we want to purchase the items, allowing them to streamline their workflow and get materials here quickly and accurately.

The library’s prior approval vendor supplied notifications of newly published materials on paper slips that were routed to the faculty.

“I find the alerts a much easier way to review potential new books for the library to acquire,” said Jeffrey Olafsen, associate professor of physics.  “The periodicity of them (weekly) is good for me as well.”

Dennis Horton, associate religion professor has also found the new GOBI alerts a useful tool.

“I have enjoyed the convenience of having the alerts sent each week,” said Horton.  “This system is leaps and bounds ahead of the old card system.”

For more information about the YBP approval plan and GOBI alerts, please contact Collection Development Librarian Ramona McKeown or your department’s librarian consultant.