The Approval Plan System enables subject librarians to easily edit your acquisition proposals, either in the form of lists or individually by title. Clearly organized and intuitively manageable selections respond to the input of data in real time and titles can be saved as favorites for ordering later. There’s a detailed page view summarizing all of the relevant information for each individual title. The use of color coding makes it easier to keep track of delivery and order status. A variety of filter options for processing subsets (e.g. “only titles from subject category X”) makes managing the acquisition procedure even easier. The front-end interface can be laid out and branded in line with the bookstore’s own corporate design.

The system also includes a management tool granting access rights to the different functions, such as “view only”, “order”, “forward”. The management of order procedures is made easier by an integrated order code administration tool for defining individual order codes, such as for individual cost centers. This additional information is passed on through the entire order process and is included in the delivery note and invoice to the customer. Furthermore, a librarian can define an acquisition budget which is then automatically reduced by the value of the titles placed in the shopping cart or those saved in the list of favorites. This feature enables your library customers to have full control over their purchase budgets at any given time.

The individual Approval Plans created for your library customers are based on customer profiles defined in the 'Approval Plan Profiler'. Title acquisition proposals are compiled and sent out according to saved criteria, such as subject category, frequency of new proposals, product type and the inclusion or exclusion of individual publishers and/or series. Email notifications keep subject librarians informed of any new Approval Plans. In addition to individual profiling, it is also possible to generate “Standard Approval Plans” based on predetermined configurations which the customer can then edit – for example a monthly Approval Plan in the subject area of Philosophy including all sub-disciplines and interdisciplinary titles related to the subject. You can always choose between fully automatic Approval Plans and those that can be individually tailored.

As a minimum, the Approval Plan System contains at least all of the titles in the NEWBOOKS meta-database, all of which are professionally selected and enriched with classifications and additional information. Upon request, we can also provide access to other databases such as VLB, Nielsen BookData, KNV, or Libri. Licensing agreements with the individual providers would have to be made by the bookstore directly. In this way, your customers can search not only NEWBOOKS title data, but also all of the title data available in your own system, or even globally, in order to generate additional orders.

The system comes with a standard option to automatically cross-match acquisition proposals with a library’s OPAC with the help of the Z39.50 interface. This international interface is a common standard used by many libraries to help manage holdings. Librarians can exclude titles which are already part of their holdings from the Approval Plan or tag them as such. When ordering, there is an option to cross-match “live” one last time, in order to take into account titles that might have been purchased since the Approval Plan was first compiled and edited by the subject acquisition librarian.

Upon request, library customers can also receive bibliographic information on titles ordered in any desired standard library format such as the international standard MARC 21 or the still-in-use format MAB for the German-speaking countries.

The system also features an interface for automatic communication of status changes (such as availability updates) between the library and the bookseller’s inventory control. We normally use EDI as a standard tool for matching this information. The ordering process can be made easier with the help of an unlimited number of lists of favorites and shopping carts, all of which can be individually edited. The granting of access rights provides the necessary structure: a library can grant individual users access to shared shopping carts, depending for example on the subject area or hierarchy level. Shopping carts can be linked to order codes or cost centers. At the same time, titles are constantly cross-matched with the library’s holdings. The acquisition process remains transparent at all times: the customer can easily follow the internal steps leading up to the placing of the actual order as well as all external the steps leading up to order delivery.