Depending on your budget, it is sometimes more cost effective to place your orders through a vendor than to have IndyPL catalog and process your items. Usually, we will charge $1.93 per item – without jacketing. Some large vendors may charge around $1 and include the jacket! Depending on the vendor and your cataloging profile, there is a fee for our cataloging staff to work with your vendor to get you set up. Because of the amount of work required to manage vendor records, we work with only a select few when it comes to importing catalog records. You may purchase materials from any vendor you like, but we will import records only from Follett and Ingram. (We import records for Lawrence Township Schools only from Junior Library Guild)
The vendor will process the item for you – put on a spine label and barcode, possibly a jacket. IndyPL needs to give them a range of barcodes and specific directions about the kind of barcode we use. Skipping this step can cause all sorts of problems if you have multiple items with the same barcode number!
The vendor will also catalog the item for you. IndyPL uses the most current cataloging rules, and requires our vendors do the same. We also have specific fields where specific pieces of data are to go. While it sounds confusing, both your vendor and our catalogers speak the same language and they will figure it out! The vendor will prepare a group of Marc records for us to download for you. We charge $10 per batch of Marc records. If you order two books every Thursday, we will charge you $10 each time we download two Marc records. If you order less frequently, or more at a time, the download process becomes more cost-effective. If you order 100 items a month, we’ll charge you $10 to download all 100 records. The download charge has nothing to do with the number of records we download, but with the time it takes to get them from your vendor, check them for quality, make final adjustments (such as setting them to checked in status), add them to our catalog, and check them again.
If you use the IndyPL classification scheme for your juvenile fiction (J P, J Z, J E, J FIC), then be aware that you will need to discuss with your vendor how to organize those for them. Some vendors will prefer that you put those items in separate carts with special notes on the carts. Even then, they may make mistakes.
Entering location codes in Follett
If you need a collection analysis, be sure to review our special instructions!
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