Suggest Library Purchases

Please work with your department’s Faculty Representative to the library. That person coordinates book ordering, representing equitably the department’s instructional and research priorities.

To receive automatic e-mail alerts of new publications in your areas of interest, contact your library liaison or Christine Fischer, Head of Technical Services.

Book orders may be submitted to the Technical Services Department or to your library liaison in a variety of forms:

• Electronically using the New Book Request Form (see above)
• Electronically from automatic e-mail alerts (see below)
• Spreadsheet lists sent to Anne Owens ([email protected])
• Notification slips announcing new book publications
• Publishers’ advertisements and flyers
• Marked catalogs
• Photocopies of reviews

Please remember, book orders must include at least:

• Author and title (for identification of item)
• Name of requesting department (for fund accounting)
• Any date limitations (add instructions such as RUSH or course reserve, or mark date needed)

Please include as much additional information as possible, e.g., publisher, date of publication, price, specific edition, series, source of information, name of requester, any special instructions (hold, notify, out of print search).

To help reduce unnecessary duplication of effort in preparing book orders, please search the Library Catalog to see if an item is already owned or on order.

If your department orders large numbers of books that may exceed your department’s allocation, please submit orders batched according to three levels of priority:

• Priority #1 – Most important; order immediately
• Priority #2 – Important; order after first priority items as funds permit
• Priority #3 – Desirable; order after February 1 if all first and second priority items have been ordered and funds are still available

March 31 is the last day Technical Services will accept book requests from departments for the current fiscal year. Requests received after March 31 typically will be ordered against the department’s allocation for the next fiscal year.

If you have any questions, please contact your library liaison or the Technical Services Department at 336.334.5281.

The Technical Services Department offers faculty automatic e-mail alerts of newly published books in their areas of interest. These alerts list new books and include brief descriptions. A faculty book selector may review the list and forward selected titles directly to the Techncial Services Department to recommend purchase. The selected titles can also be sent to a departmental library representative or to a library liaison as purchase requests.

If you are interested in receiving these e-mail alerts, please contact Christine Fischer (336.256.1193). You may also contact the library liaison who works with your department.

Money sometimes becomes available for one-time purchases at the very end of a fiscal year. Because at that point we have little time to spend the money and no time to receive physical items, we need to purchase one-time electronic resources – primarily journal backfiles, or databases of primary source material or other historical content. The availability of this money varies unpredictably from year to year, but we always want to have a wish list ready, just in case. If you have any suggestions, please contact your library liaison.

Our Budget Central pages contain additional information related to our collections expenditures.