Outsourcing, quality control, and the acquisitions professional

Outsourcing, long a presence in the library world, is increasingly seen as a way to cut technical service costs. This development has caused great insecurity among technical service librarians and frequent discussions about whether cataloging and acquisitions are threatened specializations. We argue, based on outsourcing experiences at Stanford University Libraries, that the need for experienced technical services librarians increases rather than decreases in a library that outsources some of its technical service operations. Quality control, once built into routines carried out at the clerical level, becomes a major factor for the success of the outsourced operation. This quality control component logically devolves to librarians who know how the finished product should look. We describe the quality control programs developed for monitoring a no-return approval plan and vendor-supplied cataloging.