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Continuations and Approval Plans:
How they Work Together at YBP
For many years YBP has been both an approval plan vendor and a vendor for continuations or standing orders. In learning what libraries require from these two separate core services, we have also learned how to coordinate them. Today every approval plan customer of YBP benefits from the continuations capabilities we have built.
A major difference between YBP and our competitors is that we routinely include continuations titles in our approval plan coverage. During our 2007/2008 fiscal year, for example, we profiled approximately 88,000 new titles for approval plan customers between our US and UK offices. Approximately one third of those books fell within a series or continuation category, such as annual, non-monographic series, numbered or unnumbered monographic series, and multi-volume set. This inclusiveness enables YBP to offer approval plan customers a spectrum of choices. Please contact your customer service representative for answers to your library's particular questions.
Customers can request that YBP ship on approval all volumes within a series or other continuation title. This powerful instruction overrides normal profile parameters to create a type of standing order for titles within our approval plan scope, at approval discount, with returns privileges or technical services options. (In these instances, we cannot offer all the services that we extend to traditional standing orders, e.g., apply series-level purchase orders, process routine series claims, start with a certain volume number, research back-volumes, or create separate series-only subaccounts.)
Similarly, customers may exclude all volumes within a given series from their approval plan. This approach, routinely used to control duplication against standing orders, is also a way to exclude series known to be of no interest to the library.
Another variation is that approval customers may receive notification slips for all volumes within a given series, overriding normal profile parameters. This option gives libraries a way to respond to budget cutbacks or simply to buy a series selectively.
Finally, a library may allow the approval plan profile to work normally for volumes within a series, imposing no title-specific series instruction, only one for series type (e.g., for numbered monographic series). Here the profile identifies volumes likely to be of highest interest, through normal subject and publisher specifications.
These options are made possible by our integrated, shared systems. We have meshed our continuations and monograph files and have procedures that offer customers maximum flexibility. We also eliminate duplication across continuations, approval, and firm order shipments, as well as between YBP US and UK shipments. All continuations activity is accessible to YBP customers through GOBI.
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