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Just-Published Books—Just What Your Collection Needs

For more than a generation, Blackwell Approval Plan Service has served as the academic libraries’ primary tool in building and maintaining core collections. Through an approval profile developed with your Regional Sales Manager and your individual Approval Account Coordinator, new titles can be sent to you each week. However, final approval rests with your library staff and any titles judged unsuitable for your collection may always be returned.

Approval Plans provide:

Your library profile

By helping you build an accurate profile, we ensure that the vast majority of books that come are titles you will want to keep. We work closely with all interested parties in your institution to make sure your profiles reflect your library’s collection policies—not the preferences of your vendor. Together, we build your library’s individual approval profile by selecting the subject and non-subject parameters distinctive to your collection needs. Subject definitions for your profile may be based upon Blackwell own Hierarchical Subject Thesaurus of over 5,000 terms, Library of Congress classification schedules, National Library of Medicine (NLM) classification schedules, or a combination of the three. Learn more about creating your own library profile.

Blackwell offers a variety of Approval Plans for you to work from:

Thorough and accurate coverage

Our approval plan covers all new titles of interest to academic and research libraries produced by publishers on Blackwell Core List of Publishers. We order in advance of publication through publisher Advance Book Information (ABI) to ensure that titles are supplied in a timely manner upon publication. When a new title is received, our bibliographic editors verify the accuracy of the initial new title profile record through a book-in-hand check.

Blackwell also creates a yearly Coverage and Cost study that librarians find very useful when creating a library profile. The coverage and cost study is a wonderful planning tool that includes, among other useful data, past year book list prices, average book prices in specific disciplines, and the number of titles treated in a discipline.

Efficient book profiling

When pre-publication titles match your library’s profiles, we send purchase orders to publishers, often via Pubnet. This further ensures priority treatment from publishers. Also, we aggressively pursue titles not received by their announced date. Publishers’ responses to our claims allow us to update expected publication dates in our records and to send libraries accurate reports on overdue titles. Learn more about our Blackwell book buying process with approval plans.

Approvals work hand-in-hand with your Standing Orders

Any standing orders you have with us are automatically excluded from your approval coverage. If you have standing orders with another vendor, simply provide us with a list and we can block supply of those titles from your plan.

Get the editions you want with Preferred Edition Services

As an option within our Approval Plans, we offer libraries the ability to specify preferences when titles are published simultaneously in cloth and paper. Also, for libraries with joint U.S. and U.K. Approval Plans, we offer an option for supplying the least expensive U.S. or U.K. edition. All editions are shown and linked in Blackwell Collection Manager.

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Download a PDF of our Approval Plan Fact Sheet.

Download a PDF of our Approval Plan Fact Sheet-UK format.