Bowker Thanks YOU!

Bowker would like to thank all those who participated in the recent BooksInPrint.com & GlobalBooksInPrint.com Customer Survey. We had our best response to date! Your time and feedback are greatly appreciated, and we realize that you are our best source of information and ideas when it comes to our products. Now we have to get to work implementing your suggestions! Award winners will be announced and e-mailed in May.

Here are a few interesting things we learned from you:

• We are experiencing some “growing pains!” With our increasing customer base and the ever-expanding size of our databases (GlobalBooksInPrint.com offers more than 12.1 million records, and BooksInPrint.com more than 5.5 million), Bowker realizes that you may be experiencing a slight delay when performing a search or accessing title details. We understand this is an important issue for you, and are actively working on a solution to be implemented in the near future.
  
  
• Librarians want more reviews! In fact, we had some librarians request reviews from sources already offered! As a reminder, BooksInPrint.com & GlobalBooksInPrint.com contain full-text reviews from 15 sources including: Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Choice, Booklist, and Horn Book. Peer reviews were also highly rated -- something we will certainly consider.
  
  
• Linking to your OPAC is important! Great news for all librarians who requested that BooksInPrint.com & GlobalBooksInPrint.com link to their OPAC. It already does! Using Z39.50 linking, we will search your catalog and display the results in the BooksInPrint.com interface. Future enhancements will include the ability to link directly to your OPAC interface, while keeping all the enhanced functionality of InterLibrary Loan and holds. Take this opportunity to familiarize yourself with our Hooks to Holdings feature, which lets you integrate BooksInPrint.com & GlobalBooksInPrint.com to your OPAC. For detailed instructions, contact Technical Support at 1-888-269-5372, option 2, or e-mail techsupport@bowker.com.
  
  
• You want printing and list making to be easier! Those of you who mentioned your dissatisfaction with the new list and printing enhancements, rest assured, you are being heard. Bowker has already taken action and come summer, you should see a simplification to the list feature that will allow you to add multiple titles to a list without re-choosing the list name every time. We are also looking into what can be done to simplify the printing process.
  
  
• You want core lists! A large percentage of the librarians surveyed indicated that having a core list of titles to compare to their collection would be helpful. At this time, Bowker is actively considering some exciting options in order to bring you an analysis product to use in collection development that would allow you to look at your collection holdings compared to a core list.