In the preface to this volume, we defined acquisitions as the employment of a range of methods to provide access to the information required by readers. The basic principles of acquisitions are straightforward enough: a library needs to set up procedures to obtain this information as economically and as quickly as possible. Once established, these procedures are usually executed by support staff, under only the general direction of professionals. However, the establishment and ongoing modification of these procedures, and the choices and decisions they embody, are high level professional tasks that merit consideration here.

Choice of supplier

For many years, almost all larger libraries have effectively outsourced much of the work of acquiring information resources for their collections to library supply firms, or vendors (called ‘jobbers’ in the USA). There are in fact many ways of acquiring material, and in some circumstances each one of them may be most appropriate.

Bookshops or travelling salespeople can be the most convenient, having the advantage (especially important for school and children's libraries) that you can examine a title before deciding whether to buy it – and, of course, every title you see is available, and with a known price. In addition, there are sometimes good political reasons for a library, such as a public library, to purchase at least some material locally. Against these advantages, buying from local bookshops or visiting booksellers is undoubtedly more expensive, and the range of stock is inevitably quite limited.

Online booksellers, such as Amazon.com, can be equally if not more convenient than high-street bookshops. Their databases often provide a range of ‘valueadded’ information, such as publishers’ blurbs, published reviews and even reviews contributed by customers; can be kept very up to date; and ordering is certainly easy.