Vendor-Librarian Negotiations

Dear Colleagues, 

       A little while ago, I forwarded to members of the AALL Consumer Advocacy Caucus an e-mail I had received. A researcher was requesting librarians to participate in a survey on vendor-librarian interactions, in preparation for his presentation at the Charleston Conference. I have sent tech services staff to that conference and they have always found it excellent, so I participated gladly, and encouraged any members of the caucus willing, to participate as well.  I received an e-mail back today, with instructions on how to receive the results, and info on when the presentation will be at the Charleston Conference.  I hope others will be equally interested in this:

Thanks to all of you who responded to my Vendor Negotiation Survey last month! We had a tremendous response rate – well over 200 respondents. Responses are wide-ranging and thoughtful, and offer great insight into the library’s perspective on the negotiation process and dealing with vendors. Anybody that is interested in receiving the results, please type “SEND ME THE RESEARCH DATA” in the subject of an email and send to info@data-planet.com . We will be sending the results out on or about November 14th.

For those of you attending the 2013 Charleston Conference, I’ll be presenting Secrets in Vendor Negotiations with Carl Grant (Associate Dean, Knowledge Services & Chief Technology Officer, University of Oklahoma Libraries & former Chief Librarian & President of ExLibris and President of VTLS) and Mike Gruenberg (Gruenberg Consulting, LLC), on Friday, November 8, 2:15 pm – 3 pm. We’d love to see you there! For more information and to register, visit here. We will provide actionable takeaways you will be able to use immediately in negotiations with your technology, content, and service providers. I firmly believe that more clarity in the process of negotiations provides a more level playing field, opens up budget dollars for new and innovative products, promotes greater competition among vendors, and raises overall product quality.

Of course, I will be attending sessions and would love to talk to anyone interested in all the innovative things we are doing with statistical content at Data-Planet. We have published 19 guides on statistical content since June, and will soon release overview statistical guides for US states and subject categories – our guides have direct links to infographics, DataSheets and data, providing much more detail available than any other statistical compilation. For a sample, take a look at our Climate Change subject guide. And even more exciting, we are getting ready to preview our next generation Data-Planet Statistical Datasets UI – a JAVA-free version with more powerful charting, new mapping, and much simpler and cleaner usability. We will start to preview the new Statistical Datasets interface to current customers in December. If you haven't seen it yet, we have added Snapshot Statistics to our Ready Reference interface. All Snapshots include related data links, DOIs, infographics and links to the full DataSheet.

The e-mails have been from Matt Dunie, who turns out the be the president of Data Planet.  Should be interesting, since data gathering is what they do.