Feature Articles

A Different Kind of Sameness: Recent Changes in Continuations
by Joshua Winant, CMS Manager and Continuations Supervisor

A new sales person is in-house for training and this afternoon he'll receive my crash course in the Continuations service here at YBP, or "Contins" as we call it. Depending upon his previous involvement or avoidance of Contins as a librarian, I'll either hear sympathetic sighs, or the frantic scratching of graphite across the page as every detail of a service devoted to details is noted. "Think of it this way," I'll say, "Monographs are moments frozen in time. ISBNs are kingdoms that come and go OP. Contins are the recorded histories of those ISBN kingdoms as they rise and fall within a particular country, or series as we call them." "And with history comes change," I'll exclaim. "Just look at the six o'clock news! Much like the world we see and hear about in the news, where changes are occurring at an accelerated rate, so it is in the world of Contins. Changes in technology and in the economy have increased the rate of change for both publishers and libraries alike. For Contins staff employed with a wholesaler-- the intermediary charged with sorting it all out like some UN Peacekeeper-- if your head once had a chance to stop spinning for at least a moment or two during the day, now it has none."

Economic and technological change are too entwined to discuss on their own, but their impacts on publishers and libraries are possible to separate-out. For libraries, a tight economy reduces a materials budget which has already been worn threadbare by the rising cost of periodicals. Continuation orders, or standing orders for book series, are usually fulfilled by book vendors like YBP. Periodicals include pre-paid subscriptions which are not supplied by book vendors, but by subscription agents who have drop-ship arrangements with publishers. Academic libraries, like those served by YBP, set aside the larger portion of their serials budget for periodicals. These are published more frequently than book series to assure the timely delivery of the cutting edge information they contain. As these periodicals increase in price, fewer funds are left for the less-frequent book series. Three years ago at YBP we didn't even include standing order cancellations as part of our monthly statistics, because the amount of time spent on them was not significant enough to capture. As cancellation requests increased and we began capturing this data, we've experienced seasons when the ratio of new orders to cancellations was only 2:1.

Other ways libraries bear the burden of a shrinking budget is to change how often they receive a title. Rather than receive an annual title every year, they ask to receive it every two years. Likewise, libraries have begun collecting certain series on their Approval plan as opposed to their Continuation account. For unnumbered series, which are typically broader in the scope of their topic than numbered series, the Approval plan usually offers libraries a greater discount and the ability to return volumes that may fall outside their collecting parameters. Maybe the most significant decision facing libraries today is not so much the adjustment to a reduced budget, as the reallocation of their budget to now include the wishes of their patrons to access information electronically.

Similar to libraries, technological change has not been the only external force shaping the future for publishers. The economy has certainly had its effect on them as well. Historically, the book trade has been characterized by financial analysts as a mature market with slow but steady growth. Increasingly it behaves like most other for-profit markets, in part to fund the new technology it employs. In a recent conversation with the Sales Manager of a major scientific publisher, I was told that Marketing has a greater say in the editorial process of their books than in the past. Concerns about selling books and concerns about bibliographic integrity are seen as equals. Missing volume numbers are sometimes intentional: attempts by publishers to see if a monograph might sell more copies as part of a series or as a stand alone. Whether or not there has been a corporate merger, titles often merge to test if two lesser selling series might sell better together. Split-outs are no longer unique to travel guides, and book titles frequently change with no apparent change in content-- like the proverbial old wine in new skins.

Publisher, content, and title changes, all force Contins staff to consider how much of a change is enough to query the customer. It's the latest format change-- the evolution to e-content-that has been a hard love for book-loving Contins staff. We were aware of it happening in the periodical world years ago, but it didn't affect us and even sounded like it made sense way over there on the other side of the book world. E-content first crept into Contins through the think tank publishers. For certain small institutes and societies, often non-profit in nature, order fulfillment had always been an afterthought. It made sense for them to just post their brainstorms on the web, forget about fulfillment, and spend more time thinking. Now electronic formats are cutting into the bread-and-butter titles of the Continuations vendor: the annual reference material, and what can we say? Does it make sense to wait for a print copy in December that could contain sections revised in June? We can see its value and we're not even the ones paying the $500+ for the information. Thus, when our customers began to ask, we in turn began to ask publishers a whole new string of "how to's." It was and is very labor intensive. We ask customers for information we never asked for before. We form relationships in libraries with people we've never met before. We build accounts that we will never actually (physically) ship material against. In order to deliver this new format, we have become like the subscription agents we always said we weren't. It's different alright, but it's also the same. After all, it's Continuations: we expect change. As these titles begin to unbundle from their print and online packages into either print or electronic, we're ready to accept orders for the latter if our customers are ready to make the switch. YBP has always sought to be a full service vendor, and that commitment remains as we follow Continuations into the emerging world of e-reference works: a service we will be formally announcing soon on our website and in person at Summer ALA.