Document delivery from the library catalogue

[Charles P. Hobbs]

Interesting discussion about the bookstore-enabled library catalog at
http://www.pgi.edu. As the person who developed that catalog, and made
the decision to link to Amazon, let me jump in here . . .

A few months ago, we (Phillips Graduate Institute) set up a partnership
with Amazon so that students, patients (in our counseling programs) and
other interested persons could easily obtain books used in our classes
and programs. We picked Amazon because, at the time, it was the only
online bookstore in existence (Barnes and Noble had not come on line yet).
The reimbursement Amazon provides was also attractive, as it somewhat
compensated for the revenue lost by people purchasing books through
Amazon, rather than using our bookstore (which, admittedly, has very
limited hours . . .) 

At the same time, I was working on a Web-based online catalog for the
library collection. Due to the cost of the commercial products, a decision
was made to create one in-house. I wrote the perl script that reads the
modified index files (from commercial products) and displays them as
HTML pages.

While I was writing the "catalog card" display routines, I was looking
at the ISBN field, and remembered that searches for books on Amazon could
be done by ISBN. At that point, it was easy to make the ISBN field a
link to Amazon. (As with the "bookstore", these links are set up to 
utilize our "partnership" with Amazon)

As far as I know, this is the only online library catalog anywhere 
that does this.

Now, on to some of the issues brought up here:

1. Ethics of the Amazon reimbursement. 
This is part of the Amazon "partnership" agreement and, is not
illegal* as such, although it cause a problem in some settings. In
other settings, it might be appropriate to indicate to the user
that such an arrangement is taking place.

2. Ethics of using Amazon, as opposed to a competitive bid situation
This might be a problem for a state college/university library, or a 
public library; governmental institutions are usually legally required
to have competitive bids for products and services (there are a few
exceptions). Since PGI is a private institution, I don't see it as a
legal problem for us, (*although I am not a legal professional)

3. Taxation issues. The whole issue of various jurisdictions (Fed, state,
county, city, etc) taxing transactions made via Internet is still
unresolved. Currently, most of these transactions are probably not 
taxed by any governmental agency; this might change in the future.

4. Local bookstores: Most of our materials are textbooks that are 
not often carried in "consumer" (i.e. non-academic) bookstores anyway.

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Charles P. Hobbs                          __  __     ____  ___       ___ ____
transit at primenet.com                     /__)/__) / / / / /_  /\  / /_    /
(also:hobbs at pgi.edu)                    /   / \  / / / / /__ /  \/ /___  /
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