ER&L 2016

4. External Relationships

Following this session, participants will be able to:

• Understand trends in library-vendor relationships from recent surveys conducted of both libraries and vendors.
• Learn about strategies to build and maintain effective relationships between libraries and vendors.
• Understand the essentials of a business relationship

Librarian- Vendor relations and discussions can be complicated and troublesome or clear and collaborative or somewhere in between.  Establishing positive communications and relationships between publishers, vendors, institutions and individual librarians is crucial to the effective provisioning of information resources.  This session examines survey results investigating how libraries and vendors might manage communication expectations given the changing nature of scholarly communication. Electronic resources management increasingly widens its breadth and scholarly communication continually grows its depth. Libraries and vendors have complementary and sometimes competing goals which are worthy of discussion.