Last Friday SIGALO met to discuss serials workflows. I know — that’s not something even most librarians would find all that scintillating, but it was quite interesting to me because we heard from people from several different types of libraries, including both large and small academic libraries, a large public library, and a community college library.

One thing that struck me was the level of annoyance with EBSCO due to our accounts recently having been switched to the Denver office. While my library was lucky and didn’t have too bad a time with the switch, many of the others had so many problems that they were considering switching vendors. Given what a pain it can be to switch vendors, that’s a pretty good sign of just how many problems they’ve had with things like incorrect or missing invoices, dropped subscriptions, and the like.

But one library did something great. They complained so much and so loudly that they actually got a meeting with someone fairly high up the ladder (can’t remember who, unfortunately). Why is this great? Because just switching vendors isn’t enough. The companies have to know why your library is doing what it is before they’re going to make any changes.

This also ties into a point that was made near the end of the meeting: that libraries have an immense amount of bargaining power, if only they’d stick together and use it. Yes, there are some buying consortia out there, and often a state’s library will arrange for certain databases to be available to any library in the state, but we could be going so much further than this. Imagine what might have happened if that EBSCO higher-up had met not with one library, but with representatives from twenty or more libraries, all with the same complaints.

Of course, part of the difficulty with doing this sort of bargaining has to be the willingness to simply walk away if we’re not getting the deals we want. So often we’ll get our hearts set on having one particular database when another would fulfill the same need. If we’re willing to walk away when the service is that bad, why do we so often seem reluctant to do the same when the pricing is equally outrageous?