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Acquisitions and Serials

• What is the Acquisitions/Serials Department?
• Department Organization.
• Our friendly and knowledgeable staff.

What is the Acquisitions/Serials Department?

Acquisitions/Serials work is the business side of the library. Our function involves many specialized and business-oriented activities, such as:

• Projecting materials budget needs.
• Negotiating license agreements with publishers and vendors.
• Interacting with the Business Office for budget management.
• Interacting with TAMIU's Purchasing department for special purchases.
• Communication with faculty members for order processing.
• Finding the best suppliers for books, media, journals, databases and electronic information services.
• Producing budget and order status reports, etc.

We are responsible for a materials budget of $ 1.68 million in FY2011. We produce budget status reports to monitor expenditures and encumbrances of funds. Every year we also produce projections detailing our financial needs for the coming fiscal year.

Our work requires an in-depth knowledge of the publishing and information industries, both domestic and international, as we buy books and electronic services from various countries.

Our Friendly and Knowledgeable Staff

To do our job, we have a service-oriented, and knowledgeable staff. You can communicate directly with any us if you wish.

Please contact us if you have any questions.

Department Organization

We have two major components: Acquisitions and Serials

In Acquisitions, we administer departmental budget allocations, and acquire books, eBooks, and audiovisual materials requested by faculty members and librarians. In this section of the department we also handle all gift materials received. This is an important function that continues to grow in its relevance.

Selections for new materials are often based on publishers’ catalogs, Choice cards, Books in Print, etc. We acquire monographic items both in the domestic and international markets. This section of the department is often involved in managing special acquisitions projects related to grant funds. Two recent examples are: the ongoing Hispanic American Literature Project grant, which is allowing us to acquire, in support of our collaborative PhD in Hispanic Studies, the most significant literary works from all Latin American countries. Another example is the Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language grant (UISFL), which is required us to procure special items in support of our Latin American Studies and Language & Literature programs.

Books and other monographic items we receive are sent to Cataloging where they are processed, and they are subsequently sent to Circulation to be placed in the Library stacks.

In the Serials component of the department, we are responsible for making sure the library receives on time all journals and continuations we subscribe to. We check-in daily in our automated system all issues received, and make sure all materials are sent to either the Periodicals, Special Collections, Microforms, or Reference sections, as it corresponds.

We claim issues not received on time, and we prepare bindery shipments of journals and student theses that need to get bound.

Another key component of Serials work is the maintenance of our electronic resources, including usage statistics and collaborative participation in Metalib and SFX link resolver decisions. We have access to over 250 specialized databases. Many are direct subscriptions, others are part of the TexShare databases program, and several come to us thanks to special deals arranged for all Texas A&M University libraries through our main campus in College Station, Texas. The Sue & Killam Library is a member of the Texas A&M System consortium of libraries. While TAMIU patrons do not have direct access to electronic resources licensed by our main campus, our library participates in multiple consortium packages, including access to online journals from Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, SAGE/Blackwell, Springer, Nature, American Chemical Society, and many more.