2018 Charleston Library Conference

Diminishing acquisition budgets, big deal break-ups, and rising inflationary costs make negotiations between librarians and vendors even more important. With a review of the literature and a short survey among peer institutions, this brief study looks to investigate if there is a perceived gender-bias in vendor-librarian negotiations.

While there is a lot in the literature about negotiation and the principles thereof, there hasn't been very much written about the role of gender in librarian-vendor negotiation. I wanted to investigate this more thoroughly, but more, I wanted to look at the perception of gender in these negotiations. In my own experience, there are expectations around gender in the negotiation process, and I have observed certain behaviours during my years working with vendors and I wanted to find out if others have observed the same behaviours. The survey and literature review helped with that, and with a co-presenter who is a vendor, we are sharing two perspectives that are similar yet we are coming from different places. Presenting will give us the opportunity to share the results of the survey and hopefully begin a dialogue with others to determine if there is any real basis to the perceptions and if so, what we can begin to do about changing those perceptions and perhaps changing the overall experience. This presentation offers more questions than answers, but I hope it will be interesting!