Standing Orders

Thanks to my Collected Works and Monuments projects I have a new respect for anyone who manages Standing Orders.  You would think that this would be an easy task: you order something like a series, and whenever a new one comes out -- you get it, right?  Sometimes.

I am discovering slowly yet surely that some of our standing orders are not being filled, whether due to the company itself stopping the production of the series (or the publisher going out of business) or due to just a very slow updating process. 

For my project, I have been checking our holdings against our very well organized and documented spreadsheet of standing orders, which is IMMENSE.  We had quite a lot of orders for both collected works and monuments, as well as other series which comes incrementally.  The spreadsheet also keeps track of complete orders (when we have all of the volumes) and orders which have been cancelled or stopped production.  This is not an easy task, if only because the vendors and publishers generally don't keep their online catalogs up to date.

So again, I am incredibly grateful to have this resource at my disposal, even if it blows my mind as to how vast and intricate the whole process is.