Acquisitions Unit

Order Request Form | Approval Book Review Schedule

The Acquisitions Unit is responsible for ordering and receiving monographic materials for the Library collection in all formats, including books, videos, compact discs, music scores, maps, microforms, etc., as requested or selected by Library subject bibliographers. Questions concerning the acquisitions program should be referred to Wayne Perryman, chair of the Access Services Department/Acquisitions Librarian, while those related to collection development should be addressed to Mary Kay, Collection Development Librarian.

Acquisitions Request Form

An electronic order request form is available to request that specific titles be acquired for the collection. A paper request form is also available at the Library Information Desk (L101) or in the Acquisitions Unit (L109). Prior to submitting the request, it is advisable to do a search for the title of interest in the HSU Library Catalog. The Library catalog includes fully searchable records for titles which are on order, in processing, or on review, and new titles are added daily, so you may find that your title is already in the process of being added to the collection.

Approval Program and Review Process

The majority of current new books added to the main Library collection are acquired through an approval program which the Library has in place with Yankee Book Peddler. Under that program, Yankee supplies books to the Library automatically as they are published, in accordance with a profile which is maintained by the Library bibliographers. Those books are placed on shelves in the Acquisitions Unit approval review area on a biweekly cycle (with some adjustment for holidays), where they are available for review by all interested campus faculty. The unit maintains an approval book review schedule which provides the specific dates for each approval review cycle. Approval titles not selected for addition to the collection are returned to the vendor for full credit.

Yankee Book Peddler maintains a comprehensive bibliographic database called GOBI (user name: "humboldt5224"/password: "hsusearch"), in which faculty and staff affiliated with Humboldt State University can find information on over 2 million book titles published in the United States and the United Kingdom. GOBI, or Global Online Bibliographic Information System, can be used to determine, for example, whether Yankee has treated a particular title on its approval program, and if so, whether Humboldt is scheduled to receive either a book, a selection slip, or nothing.

Firm Order Process

Certain materials or subject areas are not covered by the approval program, including non-book formats and books published two or more years ago. To procure those titles, the Acquisitions Unit uses a firm order process through which works are ordered on a title-by-title basis. These titles may be requested by Library faculty, campus faculty, and other Library patrons. Note, however, that any titles requested by campus faculty or Library patrons must be approved by a Library bibliographer or the Collection Development Librarian before Acquisitions can process the request.

Rush Requests

Acquisitions will gladly give rush treatment to an order as requested, but we do ask that this service be used with discretion. Due to the special handling which we give to rush requests, they are generally more expensive both in terms of staff time and the cost of purchase. Therefore, rush requests should be reserved for circumstances where materials are needed by a certain date in the near future. Candidates for rush ordering might include, for example, course reserve titles for the current semester, resources needed by a faculty member to meet a research project deadline, and urgent end-of-the-year requests.

Determining the Status of an Order Request

Once an order request has been approved by a Library bibliographer and submitted to Acquisitions, it will be processed as quickly as possible. The actual turnaround time for a given request will depend upon several factors. These factors include the processing priority requested (if any), the availability of funding to make the purchase, the availability of the requested item, and the number of outstanding order requests in the processing queue.