This Relationship Isn’t Working … But Hopefully We Can Still Be Friends: How to Choose and Move to a New Vendor

Abstract

With all of our daily tasks and special projects, assessing a vendor’s performance is probably the last item on a library’s priority list. But with rapid technology growth and the budgetary difficulties that libraries have faced in recent years, this overlooked task is becoming more imperative. Last spring at our institution, it became apparent that we needed to work with a larger serials subscription agency, and we began researching our options. In this presentation, we will discuss vendor areas to evaluate including interface, costs and service. We will also cover the vendor migration’s additional benefits including the improvement of our workflow and the opportunity it provided for us to evaluate our serials collection in terms of usage, format, scope and cost.