Stacey Marien Profile
Stacey Marien Profi le
0 Acquisitions Librarian, American University Library 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW , Washington, DC 20016 , USA
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Article 20
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Pushing the v endor to Improve ...
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the road and upset the good customer service
I have come to expect.
bob’s Story
Every unhappy customer is unhappy in her
own way. Tolstoy himself couldn’t have done
a better job of showing how that is true than
our partner and friend Stacey Marien has done.
And in the early period she describes, Coutts
gave Stacey and her American university
colleagues plenty of ways in which to be
unhappy. The famous Tolstoy quotation comes
from Anna Karenina. Fortunately for us all,
and unlike the novel, our story had a painful
start yet ended well.
In fact, though, Stacey concludes with one
last “if they could only” statement, and so the
story hasn’t really ended at all. The scariest
kind of customer, in a business where so many
details can go wrong, and where all of us can
see so many ways to improve how libraries
acquire their books, are the “happy” customers
you never hear from. For one thing, they are
not helping you to improve. You might get the
idea you’re doing pretty well. Never a good
idea, in this business, to get too satisfied. For
another, that customer might be doing all her
talking to your competition, and not to you.
We’re glad Stacey talked to us in 2010. A
better Tolstoy reference for the book vendor
world at the time would have been War and
Peace. blackwell customers had to move,
one way or another, there was upheaval in all
directions, and corporate change was only a
part of it. 2010 was also a year when eBooks
reached a certain tipping point and vendors
had to get down to serious work to support
integration with print books.
American was among the first of our cus
tomers to use the OASIS “Review Shelf” for
online selection of print and eBooks. We’d
worked hard to be the first vendor to offer
that service to academic libraries. Among
the blackwell customers who joined Coutts,
American was the first to set up shelf-ready
service for the print books they bought. So
beyond the basics involved in setting up a
new account, which can be complex enough,
such as getting the invoices right, and the
shipping details, and the customer service
communications, there was an extra layer or
two of complexity.
against the grain
people profile
n Planisefor erac dna :dnuorgkcab I’ve worked at American University for
ie 16 years. I started as the Business Librarian and then moved to Technical Services and
r became the Acquisitions Librarian five years ago. Prior to that I was the Business Librarian
a at Elon College (now University) for three years. I received my MSLS from UNC Chapel
Hill, MBA from UMASS Boston and a BA in Humanistic Studies from McGill University.
Min my sP rae time: I garden, cook, read mysteries, volunteer at the local pet store and
for a group that helps people age in place.
y f etirova :skob I’m a big mystery fan. Right now my favorite authors are Christopher
e Fowler, Jussi Adler-Olssen, Martin Walker, ML Longworth, and Louise Penny.
c
a omst meorabl raec :achievmnt Having a column (Let’s Get Technical)
t in ATG, of course!
S /wohrehw od i es eht yrtsudni ni evif s:raey I cannot predict the future!
Did everything go smoothly? Just re-read
Stacey’s contribution for the answer. Did
things go terribly wrong? Read Stacey for that
answer too. Where my Tolstoy referencing
goes off the tracks is with the first part of that
famous Anna Karenina quotation, that all
happy customers are alike. They are not. Today,
I count 28 active OASIS users at American
university. These Au users have been trained
to use a customized interface to support a
particular workflow involving selections, record
downloads, and EDI orders for print books as
well as eBooks. Many of these transactions
result from the outputs of the profiles we have
established with Au selectors in 30 different
subject areas. Some of these profiles prefer
print books, some prefer eBooks. Some have
variants in support of eBook and print book
DDA programs. Some profiles support
approval plans, others don’t. We maintain some
300 active Au standing orders for series titles
and annuals, blocking these against each of the
profiles. We record Au purchases under about
140 different funds.
This amounts to a substantial sum of money
each year. We are glad to have that business,
of course. And we are equally glad to have a
librarian like Stacey as our principal contact
at American university. “ Stacey puts the
facts on the table,” as one of my colleagues
says. Stacey was not only organized, direct,
persistent, and patient in her criticisms and
suggestions, but she also offered all of this in
a spirit, as she says, of partnership.
The business of academic bookselling is
always, it seems, in transition. In that year (...truncated)