College and Research Libraries LINDA ANN HULBERT AND DAVID STEW ART CURRY Evaluation of an Approval Plan; / On the basis of a study evaluating an approval plan employed by a health sciences library, it was found that receipt of preselected materials from a vendor can assist considerably in collection development. However, such a plan cannot totally replace the use of book reviews and publishers' fliers and other selection procedures As ONE oF THE DEPARTMENTAL LIBRARIES in the University of Iowa library system, the Health Sciences Library serves the Colleges of Medicine, Dentistry, Pharmacy, and Nursing and the Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology. The libraries began use of a book approval plan in Oc- tober 1975. This was not the libraries' first encounter with approval plans, but because the coverage of an earlier plan appeared un- satisfactory, the medical library (the precur- sor of the present Health Sciences Library) dropped out of it. The experience left us with a certain skepticism. Could or would this new plan be better? Could we trust it enough to reduce our other selection efforts in the Health Sciences Library? Since the inception of approval plans, books and journal articles have appeared on the subject in large numbers. Axford con- ducted a cost study and Evans and Agyres a use study. 1 ' 2 Theoretical discussions abound. 3 - 7 However, few papers examine whether or not the libraries are receiving on approval the material for which they would otherwise have had to place firm orders. DeVilbiss comes closest to that kind of study. 8 However, the subject of her study was narrow, the comparison of the perfor- mance of two vendors. The basis for satisfac- tion was the comparison of the number of titles received on approval with the number of those listed in the Cumulative Book Linda Ann Hulbert is collection development librarian, Upstate Medical Center, State Univer- sity of New York, Syracuse. David Stewart Curry is health sciences librarian, Health Sciences Li- brary, University of Iowa, Iowa City. Index (CBI). This ignores the fact that, even if given the opportunity, the library would not have ordered all the titles listed in C BI. Our hope was that a study in our library would indicate which publishers were ade- quately covered by the approval plan so that some in-house operations for selection could be streamlined or eliminated. The intent of this paper is to offer a technique for evaluat- ing approval plans and to list valuable re- viewing journals in the health sciences. Heretofore, the librarians had been exam- ining book reviews in thirty-two journals (listed in table 1). The list of journals to monitor was based on the work by Chen and Wright. 9 ' 10 The journals selected for the study were divided into groups, with each librarian assigned to monitor one group of journals for a three-month period. In addition, a librarian examined publishers' fliers and the American Boo~ Publishing Record. Each year from such sources as these thousands of requests are generated, searched, and typed; and a large (and possi- bly disproportionate) amount of time is re- quired for the selection of materials. The acquisitions department of the main university library, which is responsible for the actual purchase of all book materials, es- tablished the approval plan profile. As stated, the plan for the Health Sciences Li- brary is to make available "new U.S. and Canadian books at junior-senior level or above .in all subject areas except . . . vet- erinary medicine, animal husba,ndry, and mortuary science." Monographic serials were to be represented by the ·first volume only. Several foreign-based but English- language publishers were to be represented, I 485 486 I College & Research Libraries • November 1978 TABLE 1 REQUESTS FROM Boot REVIEWS BY SOURCE Total Books Rec'd or Number Percentage Number Books Ordered Previ- olBooks ol Books o( Received ously, or on Had to Had to Journal Books On Approval Standing Order Order Order American Book Publishing Record 23 9 12 2 9% American Family Physician 6 6 0 American Heart Journal 5 2 3 0 #American Journal of Diseases of Children 8 2 4 2 25% American /ournal of Hospita Pharma(' 8 7 0 American Journal o Ophthalmology #American Journal of 2 2 0 Pharmacy• 3 2 33% #American Journal of Psychiatry 18 2 12 4 22% American Journal of Public Health 2 2 0 American Journal of Roentgenolop- 2 2 0 Anesthesiology 6 6 0 Annals of Internal Medicine 44 4 38 2 5% Applied Spectroscopy 1 1 0 Archives of Disease in Childhood 2 2 0 Archives of Internal Medicine• 15 2 13 0 Archives· of Neurology 10 2 8 0 Archives of Pathology 2 2 0 #ASHA . 4 1 3 75% Books in Print• 2 2 0% #British Medical Journal 61 16 35 10 16% Chronicle of Higher Education• 1 1 0 Clinical Chemistry 15 15 0 #Current Contents (2 editions) 108 29 57 22 20% Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology 5 5 0 Gastroenterology 14 2 11 7% Hospital Progress• 1 1 0 Hospitals 15 2 13 0 JAMA 188 37 144 7 4% #Journal of the American Dental Association 33 8 20 ' 5 15% #Journal of the American Dietetic Association 4 2 2 50% Journal of Bone and Joint Surge~ (A) 9 2 6 11% Journal of Me 'cal Education 0 Journal of Pharmaceu- tical Sciences 6 1 5 0 #Lancet 93 23 50 20 22% #Library Journal* 9 3 4 2 22% Login* 96 21 53 22 23% #New England Journal of Medicine 64 11 46 7 11% #Nature 20 2 11 7 35% New Physician* 1 1 0 #New Zealand Medical Journal 20 3 8 9 45% Publishers Weekly* 1 1 0 Psychiatry• 1 1 0 Psychosomatic Medicine 2 2 0 #Radiology 13 2 5 6 46% RQ 2 2 0 #Science 59 11 36 12 20% Unknown Sources 6 1 3 2 33% Total 1,011 199 663 149 15% "Not regularly monitored journals. #Journals retained for monitoring due to study. among them American Elsevier and Ex- cerpta Medica. For any books costing over $75 and certain other items (e.g., compila- tions of previously published papers), the vendor was to send forms instead of the books for examination. Using the informa- tion on the forms, we decided whether to order the · books. For this study books re- ceived in each way were treated as "ap- proval books." THE STUDY The basic plan for the study was to con- tinue to use all book selection techniques as in the past but to keep additional records. Thus we would be able to tell later the source of each book request, if we had re- ceived other requests for the. same book, and how we finally obtained the book. In this way we were able to determine the amount of overlap between our standard book selection techniques and the approval plan. To minimize the number of firm orders that required typing, we held back all re- quests generated from book reviews and publishers' fliers for a period of three . months to see if the book would be supplied on the approval plan. Books requested by patrons or needed quickly for our reserve collection were ordered immediately. The study covered books with a copyright date 1975 or 1976 only, and data were collected from March 1 to November 1, 1976. Prior to the major portion of the study, a preliminary count by publisher was made of books received on approval. Books from four publishers (Academic Press, Halsted, Mosby, and University Park Press) were being received in quantities large enough so that we could assume adequate coverage. We excluded these publishers from the request-originating portion of the study (in order to reduce the number of requests that had to be prepared and searched). The li- brarians were instructed to ignore fliers and reviews for these publishers' books unless a particular work was considered essential. The precise procedures for the collection and tabulation of the data are available from the authors to anyone wishing to replicate the study. Information accumulated during the study was sorted into four files: File I: Records for all books received with Evaluation of an Approval Plan I 481 1975 or 1976 copyright dates (excluding theses, government documents, non-book materials, etc.). File II: Requests generated from fliers if the requested book had been received in some other way (book review, already in the library, standing order, approval plan) at any time before the end of the study. File Ill: Records for books which after three months had to be ordered, as long as they were not later received on approval. File IV: Requests generated from book reviews if the books had been received in some other way at any time before the end of the study. RESULTS Data from the preceding files were used in tabulating the study results. To deter- mine the efficiency of each segment of our selection process, we counted the number of unique requests resulting from that selec- tion method and compared that total to the number of requests duplicated by other selection sources. Table 2 gives the status of the 993 re- quests generated due to book reviews, indi- cating how many of the requested books were received through other methods (857) and the number of unique requests which ultimately resulted in a new order's being placed (136). For brevity, the publishers are grouped by type although data were kept on each publisher. Any publisher with a corporate address outside the U.S. or Canada was considered a "foreign" publisher. (Elsevier was cate- gorized as "general" because it was covered in the approval plan.) The "health sciences" group included Lea & Febiger, Mosby, Saunders, Williams & Wilkins, and Year Book. All other publishers were categorized as "general." Table 2 also provides in the last column the percentages of requests that resulted in orders. As might be expected, books from "foreign" publishers had to be ordered in the greatest quantity, 31 percent as com- pared to 13 percent for "general'' and 7 per- cent for "health sciences" publishers. Al- though our approval plan was not supposed to cover "foreign" publishers, 14 percent of the requested titles were received on ap- proval, reflecting the international distribu- 488 I College & Research Libraries • November 1978 c tion network used by some publishers. -"' ~ ~ ~~~ There were more received on approval from C') t-..-<" 0 percent). "- II> """" g' ..0 :::::~~ Individual data for each publisher indi-E 0 a:: " """" """" z cated that requests generated from book re- views were unique requests less than 10 f~ "' """"""""""" percent of the time for a number of them. """" Therefore, books from these twenty-seven ] publishers, many of them major firms, are "'Oo now ignored when we monitor book re- 0~ a::o a) "-" ~z C') """' ~0 tion in the work required for the librarians ~ reading book reviews. Books from at least . ~ g Q')..-<0 thirty-two publishers, including societies .-. views, table 1 also shows the disposition of e; 0 -g ~ 0 t- lf:l" t A.. ultimately on approval; (2) the number al- "" .c 0 0 ready received, on order, or on standing t.:i II> ~ E bl) order; (3) the number to be ordered; and (4) 0 c .. ~ I~ ·- II> • (0 """I~ "'0 "'0 0 the percent to be ordered. C'l 3 c;z C'l >- ~ ~ e "' Following the study, we were able to re-...:l "' .:; j;Q ~ "'0 move seventeen reviewing sources from the < t.:i ~ s: original list of thirty-two journals after com-E-< t.:i · ~ ~ c t: paring the number of books requested due a:: ~ ~~ 0 " a:: a:: journals to the number that had to be -or-"" ~ "' "'0 dered as shown in table 1. (The sources in-f-< * "' t.:i ~ c dicated with an asterisk in table 1 were ::::> c ~ ~~~ 0 0 II> non-mandatory reviewing sources but were t.:i a:: "'0 ~ 0 lf:l"- II> C'l C\1..-o, Journals were removed as reviewing a::o. ] .. < sources if requests resulted in less than 10 8 E ~ ~:::::8 ~ " """" C'l percent of the cases (indicating 90-percent z ~ coverage through other methods). " Two journals with an order percentage ~0 ~ ~l1:~ ~ above 10 percent were also removed: Jour-~z """" 00 :!l " nal of Bone and Joint Surgery (A) (11 per-CJ' e cent) because all the reviews monitored re-c 0 suited in only one book order, and Login c;~. c 0 """" l1:a)C') .::: New Title Abstracts (23 percent) because in-- "0 (0 ..- Two journals formerly thought to be pri->...0 "e f-< " ~ ~-£ ~ .... 0 mary reviewing sources, ]AMA (Journal of c::cu .... Q.l(U c c3~J5~~ ? the American Medical Association) and An- nals of Internal Medicine, were removed from the list of journals monitored. How- ever, because their contents are very useful for keeping up with current activities in medical science, we shall continue to set these two journals aside for browsing by the librarians. Some journals, such as ASHA (American-Speech and Hearing Association), despite the few books reviewed, remained on the list to give librarians an opportunity to keep in touch with material in subject fields which our library covers. We have also added Nursing as a browsing journal to round out coverage of the basic colleges served. The fact that we were able to remove more than half of the journals previously ex- amined indicates that (1) our other selection methods, including the approval plan, give adequate coverage to the basic and usually reviewed materials; and (2) many journals are so late in publication or reviewing that more than half of the items reviewed are either already in the library or on order by some other method. Table 3 shows the disposition of the 506 requests that originated from publishers' fliers with a total of 100 (20 percent) of these requests resulting in an order. Several comparisons may be offered with table 2. The total number of requests generated from publishers' fliers was about half that from book reviews, 506 versus 993, but the number of unique requests from each type of source was roughly comparable, indi- cating the greater numerical effectiveness of publishers' fliers for book selection. Of the books requested due to fliers, 38 percent were acquired through the approval plan during the study, compared with only 20 percent of "book review" books. On the other hand, 446 (45 percent) of the "book review" books were already in the collection versus only 109 (22 percent) of the "flier" books. Two main reasons can be advanced: Publishers' fliers tend to be much more cur- rent than book reviews, and this seems especially true of the "health sciences" pub- lishers where the percentage of unique or- ders was almost five times as high for fliers as for book reviews, 33 percent versus 7 percent. In addition, there is more duplica- tion of titles in book reviews than in pub- Evaluation of an Approval Plan I 489 I I~ 490 I College & Research Libraries • November 1978 lishers' fliers if the fliers are monitored sys- tematically. Obviously , we were not receiving fliers from foreign publishers, as there were no requests or orders. Of the 20 percent that had to be ordered, 18 percent were from "general" publishers and 33 percent from "health sciences" publishers. There was a great deal of variation among individual publishers in the percentage of unique re- quests resulting from fliers , ranging up to 91 percent. We have stopped monitoring fliers that yielded less than 10 percent unique . requests, thus excluding fifteen publishers-thirteen "general" and two " health sciences." Books from at least twenty-five other publishers will continue to be ordered from fliers. Data resulting from this study , broken down by individual publisher, were used as the basis of discussions with the university library's acquisitions department. We were concerned because the percentage of books received on the approval plan from several major publishers was substantially lower than the average. That concern has been re- layed to the approval vendor in hopes that the firm will increase its efforts to cover these publishers better. Since many books had been received during the three-month hold period, we decided to continue this hold period even after the study was com- pleted, except for publishers whose books had not been supplied in quantity by the vendor. Table 4 shows that we rely on the ap- proval plan for over half of our material and on patron requests for only 10 percent. It should be noted that the totals of table 4 do not correspond directly to those of the ear- lier tables, because table 4 lists all the books received during the six-month study, whereas tables 2 and 3 indicate the number of books searched and ordered during that period. Table 5 shows the number of books of- fered by the approval vendor and the number selected for our collection. Of those books received from the approval vendor, 79 percent came from " general" publishers, illustrating the importance of this type of publisher to a health sciences library. Our interest profile listed with the vendor was probably well prepared , since only 11 percent of the books offered were rejected. It is felt that most of the rejects were from form selection rather than from the books sent (although the data are not so divided in table 5) . This would indicate that the ap- proval vendor was successful in eliminating the less important titles and informing us of them through forms. Many of the rejected books were recommended for other de- partmental libraries. CONCLUSIONS Based on the results of this study, we have been able to reduce appreciably the work required for book selection. There are fewer journals to monitor for book reviews TABLE 4 Source Approval Plan Book Review or Flier Patron Request Standing Order Total General Health Sciences Foreign Total SOURCES OF ALL BOOKS RECEIVED Numbe r 730 330 131 97 1,288 TABLE 5 BOOKS RECEIVED ON APPROVAL Total Books Received Books Accepted Number Percent Number Perce nt 650 167 7 824 79 20 1 100% 560 163 7 730 86 98 100 89% Pe rce nt 57 25 10 8 100% Books Rejected Number Percent 90 4 94 14 2 0 11% and fewer publishers with whom we must be concerned. This has permitted the librar- ians more time for browsing through the contents of the major health sciences jour- nals rather than concentrating on their book reviews . We have assured ourselves that the approval plan offered by our vendor works well for our library, and we were able to speak with the firm in specific terms regard- ing underrepresented publishers in the hope of improving its service. While our objectives have been met, data were collected for only a limited time, and we cannot assume that the approval plan will continue to function as well in the fu- ture. It may be worthwhile to repeat the study in a year to determine the effect of the alterations and to make sure that the operation of the plan has not deteriorated. However, the memory of the work involved Evaluation of an Approval Plan I 491 in the current study will temper our en- thusiasm for embarking on another one. At first glance the percentage of books selected by other methods but ultimately supplied by the approval plan (20 percent of titles from book reviews and 38 percent from fliers) may appear dishearteningly low. The main reason that these percentages are so low is that we often had the book already or it was on order at the time. The number of books received through the approval plan was more than twice the number received due to book reviews and publishers' fliers, and the total staff effort was less for the former activity than for the latter. Thus we have acquired through the approval plan the majority of the books we need. The ap- proval plan complements our other methods of book selection, but it will not replace them. REFERENCES 1. H. W. Axford, "Economics of a Domestic Approval Plan," College & Research Librar- ies 32:368--75 (Sept. 1971). 2. G. E . Evans and C. W. Agyres, "Approval Plans and Collection Development in Academic Libraries," Library Resources & Technical Services 18:25-50 (Winter 1974) . 3 . A. L. Devolder, "Why Continue an Approval J?lan?" Mountain-Plains Library Quarterly 17:11-16 (Summer 1972). 4 . M. Dobbyn, "Approval Plan Purchasing in Perspective," College & Research Libraries 33:480-84 (Nov. 1972). 5. International Seminar on Approval and Gathering Plans in Large and Medium Size Academic Libraries, 1968, Western Michigan University , Proceedings, edited by Peter Spyers-Duran (Littleton, Colo.: Libraries Un- limited, 1969). 6. J. Maddox, "On My Mind: Approval Plans: Viable?" journal of Academic Librarianship 1:22 Gan. 1976). 7. M. Wilden-Hart, " Long Term Effects of Ap- proval Plans," Library Resources & Technical Services 14:400-406 (Summer 1970). 8. M. L. DeVilbiss, "Approval Built Collection in the Medium-Sized Academic Library," College & Research Libraries 36:487-92 (Nov. 1975). 9. Ching-chih Chen and Arthuree M . Wright , "Current Status of Biomedical Book Review- ing: Part I . Key Biomedical Reviewing Jour- nals with Quantitative Significance," Medical Library Association Bulletin 62:105-12 (April 1974). 10. Ching-chih Chen, "Current Status of Biomedical Book Reviewing: Part II . Time Lag in Biomedical Book Reviewing, " Medical Library Association Bulletin 62:113-19 (April 1974).