Hawaii: Pitiful Number of Books

[Pat Wallace <DENWALL@AOL.COM>]

Patricia Wallace,Chair, Hawaii Working Group, denwall@aol.com
I am forwarding this post sent to me  on 1/17/97 by a reference librarian in
Hawaii who is also a member of the Librarians Association of Hawaii.
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It's great that the Alternatives in Print Task Force is sponsoring the
program at the ALA Conference.  Hopefully the publishers will also
become alarmed.  We are not getting the diversity of publishers and
subjects that we used to get.

I was the selector for Dewey Class 900 (history, geography and travel,
collected biographies)  adult reference and  circulating collections.
Our library gets the most books (pitiful number so far).  We used to get
copies of the shipping lists for this building, but Caroline Spencer,
director of HSL, forbade the copying of the shipping lists.  She  said
that copying  costs  were too much.  We protested to no avail.

Bart Kane said at the hearing last Saturday that B&T has shipped
60,000 units to fulfill the FY96 contract requirements.  He also said
 that the remainder of the unshipped FY96 orders had been cancelled
 so that from now on there will be no duplicate orders sent to us.
We find it hard to believe that 60,000 units were really shipped.
We hope Senator Ige presses for answers about statistics that
Bart promised to give him.

My survey of the HSL shipping lists from July 1996 (B&T's first shipping
lists) to December 10, 1996 was limited to adult collection books. We got
1,486 titles of which 56% were fiction and 44% nonfiction. We got mostly
single copies of those titles, and the total units (copies) was 1,712 of
which 61% were fiction and 39% nonfiction.  I didn't separate the count
to show hardcover and paperback.  These figures are terrible for what is
supposed to be a major metropolitan resource library .

Aloha