Abstract:

Based on interviewing associate chief or director of purchase department from 5 college libraries in Shanghai, this essay has summarized and analyzed 5 mistaken ideas in book purchase and collection construction in colleges, and drawn conclusions as following: firstly, it’s far from enough for book purchase to depend on booksellers’ purchase catalogs and leak detection is very important; secondly, reasonable books discount is good for building a winwin relationship between libraries and booksellers and libraries should not require many lowend additional services from booksellers; thirdly, although catalog coverage, the rate of books available and the time of getting books are important criteria to measure booksellers’ service quality, these criteria should not be used for every type of bookseller with the same weight, as specialized areas and management mode of each bookseller should be taken into consideration; fourthly, book purchase bidding is significantly different from that for equipments, so administration of colleges and libraries should make efforts to build a bidding proper for the practice of book purchase; finally, collection building of libraries should adapt to college size and subject characteristics, and being allround and special should be taken account at the same time.

Keywords: Book purchase, Collection construction, In-depth interview