February 24, 2014

Dear UPCC Publishers,

We hope that everyone's year is off to a great start! At MUSE, our year has been very busy (and snowy!) so far, with exhibits at AHA, MLA, and ALA Midwinter, and even a meeting with HighWire in California.

We've been in the process of compiling reports from 2013 sales, arriving soon in your boxes. Thanks to another great year in 2013, UPCC has now passed the $10 million sales mark.

One major focus over the last few months has been short- and long-term paths forward for high-use coursebooks in MUSE. We will be following up soon about specific approaches.

Without further ado, here's this month's update:

• Summary of our November Survey
  
  
• Coming Soon: New Single Title Pricing Option
  
  
• Cataloging in Publication as a Library Marketing Strategy
  

All best wishes,

Mark your calendars: The annual Project MUSE Publishers Meeting will take place in Baltimore on Thursday, April 24, 2014. Details coming soon.

We have a large and growing to-do list, and we thank everyone who completed our brief November survey. The results, including useful comments, will help immensely with our planning and communication. 

The survey first listed initiatives and asked respondents to "vote" for ALL items they thought important. Most items received healthy support, with definite frontrunners, below.

When respondents had to choose just ONE item as the most important, a new metadata interface and a new coursebook model were the clear "winners," below.

We were very pleased with the response, and we will be following up with updates on these initiatives and much more throughout the year!

For books in our single title sales program, MUSE applies a multiplier of 2---i.e., 200% of the prices submitted by publishers---to arrive at the "library list prices" sent to YBP.

But we know that sometimes "one size does not fit all." Some of you have asked to have more control over your single title prices. For example, a publisher might want to offer the same prices in all their multi-user channels. Or, a publisher might already apply a multiplier (e.g., institutional pricing), resulting in unusually high prices submitted to YBP.

The solution: publishers will soon be able to to opt in or out of the MUSE multiplier in one easy step that applies to all their books in the program. And, no pesky changes to metadata submission required!

Sneak preview below: the new option will be available this spring in the single title selection tool in your Pilot accounts.  

A Case for CIP Participation

I was intrigued to read about the Library of Congress "PCN program" (Preassigned Control Number) a few weeks ago on one of the AAUP listservs. The discussion centered on whether switching to the PCN program over the CIP (Cataloging in Publication) program would adversely affect sales.

Sure, the cute little catalog record in the print book, beloved of bookstore browsers, could be viewed as an artifact from when libraries used it to type up local "catalog cards" decades ago.

But! In today's world, that CIP information ALSO goes immediately into the Library of Congress online catalog, OCLC/WorldCat.org, and various library catalogs and discovery tools around the world. In fact, Project MUSE retrieves Library of Congress catalog records, including those CIP records, to create MARC records for customers.

I headed to the Library of Congress (LC) exhibit at the ALA Midwinter Meeting to learn more. Here's the scoop:

• The appeal of the PCN program is that it's faster than CIP, and you just include the preassigned control number in the print book. 

• The downside of PCN is that no electronic bibliographic record is created. The control number will be used in the future only IF an LC cataloging record is ever created....months or years later.

• Fortunately, the 20% of books that move more slowly through CIP are usually in subject areas that aren't UPCC strongholds: children's materials, or more recently, science and engineering publications. 
  

Providing rich LC metadata at the time of publication greatly facilitates discoverability. Discoverability is KING, and libraries need all the help they can get. (Indeed, providing full-level MARC records to customers is crucial for UPCC).

I hope that UPCC publishers, at least, will continue to participate in their countries' Cataloging in Publication programs for their academic books. Think of CIP as the best kind of global library marketing---and it's free.