ACQUISITIONS
Electronic Ordering of Monographs Part II: Yankee Book Peddler's GOBI	Marla Schwartz American University mschwar@american.edu

In Part I of "Electronic Ordering of Monographs" (TSLL vol. 24, no. 3, March 1999, page 11), JoAnn Hounshell wrote about Blackwell's Collection Manager. Other major book vendors also offer access to their online databases via the Web, and these databases have been used for some time by acquisitions and collection development librarians as bibliographic searching tools. Increasingly, they are being used interactively for ordering and as a source of records for integrated library systems. Publishers and vendors of legal materials have lagged behind in development of their Web sites for these purposes; they should be encouraged to upgrade their databases to make them more useful for acquisitions and collection development, and more compatible with library systems. In this article I will discuss Yankee Book Peddler's GOBI database and how it interacts with the INNOPAC system.

American University's Washington College of Law Library established an approval plan for monographs with Yankee Book Peddler (YBP) in January 1995. Each week we receive approximately 25 books on approval and many new-title notification slips in a broad range of LC call numbers, which are distributed to librarians for selection. From these slips, we place orders for about 200 additional monographs per month. As a YBP customer, we have access to GOBI, their Web-based Global Online Bibliographic Information system which allows online searching, selecting, and ordering. GOBI has gone through many upgrades and enhancements in the four years that we have been using it. For the most up to date descriptions of what GOBI offers, I refer you to the their Web site: http://www.ybp.com/gobi.htm.

We have been INNOPAC users for over 10 years. As many of you know, this system has also had a number of enhancements and upgrades over the years and has taken full advantage of the Internet. For example, libraries can use file transfer to obtain invoices for serials from most of the major periodicals vendors, eliminating the need to manually post individual payments. File transfer can also be used to obtain bibliographic and order records for books sent on approval. In order to extend this use for firm orders, YBP and Innovative Interfaces worked together to develop GobiLink, which eliminates the need to double key bibliographic and order records for monographs in both GOBI and INNOPAC. GobiLink is now available for other integrated library systems, and INNOPAC will also link with other book vendors.

I will briefly describe how the process works, but again I refer you to both vendors for more detailed information. YBP offers this description of GobiLink:

With GobiLink, librarians can import files of order records into their own system, customized with local data such as purchase order, fund, location, and notes. GobiLink also facilitates overlay of order records with cataloging records, obtained either through OCLC PromptCat or directly from YBP. GobiLink can also deliver electronic invoicing, and can trigger encumbrance, order, receipt, and payment transactions into the library's system.

We have two passwords for GOBI, one for searching and selecting, and one for searching, selecting, and ordering. Librarians have the ability to search by author, title, subject, ISBN, LC class, series, or publisher, or to look at bibliographic information for all of the notification slips in each week's shipment. In addition to the bibliographic data that is found on the notification slips, GOBI records include local history for each title, e.g. whether it has been ordered, shipped and invoiced or, for approval books, returned, as well as the date the book was "handled on approval," or profiled for our library and/or other libraries. As with Blackwell's Collection Manager, each record includes a place to mark it for selection, add notes for acquisitions staff, or, in the ordering mode, to add information such as fund code and transmit the order.

After selectors have marked the records for future ordering, acquisitions staff can bring up the selection list in GOBI and place the orders. After the initial search of INNOPAC, all keying is done in GOBI. Even though most of our librarians who do collection development still prefer working with paper notification slips, these slips can be used for pulling up records in GOBI by ISBN and then placing the orders by filling in any local notes and hitting the appropriate key to generate the order. If the library has implemented GobiLink, these orders can be put in a file to transfer standard MARC formatted order confirmations to the INNOPAC using FTP, generating bibliographic and order records in the system. Once the INNOPAC records are created, the library creates a file of the new orders containing the YBP order confirmation number for each order and transfers it back to GOBI with actual purchase order (i.e. order record) numbers attached. These purchase order numbers are then added to the YBP record of the order transaction and are used to link orders with cataloging records sent when the book is shipped, if the library receives cataloging from the book vendor. If a library is using OCLC PromptCat for cataloging, this file would be sent by YBP to OCLC for catalog records. Records are returned to the INNOPAC via GOBI with or without invoice data attached for automatic posting. In order to use the automatic posting feature, the library must have Innovative's "extended approval plan interface." This interface was designed to transmit bibliographic, order, and invoice data from book vendors to INNOPAC for books received on approval. GobiLink and similar links between INNOPAC and other book vendors were developed to allow such transfers for firm orders as well as approvals. I believe they allow libraries to take full advantage of the capabilities of both systems and help to save time and increase accuracy in acquisitions procedures.