January 10, 2002
Odegaard librarian entrepreneur enjoying best of both worlds
By Steve Hill
University Week
It sounds a lot like the beginning of a joke: have you heard the one about the computer programmer, the manager, and the librarian?
The threesome – three brothers, actually – walked into a bar two and a half years ago. The two elder brothers came along reluctantly. Their youngest sibling, the programmer, had been egging them on all night.
“OK, we’ll go for just one beer,” Peter McCracken, the librarian, recently recalled saying.
McCracken, a reference librarian at East Carolina University at the time, had returned to Seattle to spend a relaxing spring break with his family. Once in the bar, his brothers began talking about the then red-hot high-tech sector of the economy.
“They were talking about the dot-com world and all the things happening and I said, ‘Well, I have an idea. I know something that’s going to work.’ And as it turned out, we closed down the bar.”
No joke. That night McCracken and his brothers laid the foundation for their company, Serials Solutions. They eventually partnered with an old high school friend and now have blossomed to the point where they have 10 employees and clients in 45 states and Canada.
“Every day we get giddy,” said McCracken, whose full-time job is as a reference and instructional librarian in the UW’s Odegaard Undergraduate Library.
“In July of 2000 when we went to our first national conference, we didn’t have any clients. We signed our first client that August, I think. Then we started to sign a few more and before you knew it we had two dozen clients, which was unbelievable. Then, it just went through the roof.Sáe set new records for sales every month and exciting new things happen all the time.”
Among their clients are two branches of the Library of Congress, two branches of the New York Public Library, and mammoth college libraries at Indiana University and the University of Texas.
His idea that eventually led to Serials Solutions was to provide a service that could accurately track the rapidly changing contents of magazine databases. The databases that libraries subscribe to are constantly changing, according to McCracken. Keeping up with those changes, he said, is incredibly labor intensive.
“We’re talking about thousands and thousands of magazine titles,” McCracken said.
So libraries tell Serials Solutions which databases, or aggregators, they subscribe to. The company then tells the library what magazines are in the databases.
Harvard Business Review, for example, used to be available in a lot of databases and then one of the database aggregators got an exclusive deal,” McCracken said. “It was dropped from the other databases. So an aggregator loses Harvard Business Review, they want to find other things to add. There’s always a balance between their income from the libraries and the cost of providing these different magazines. So maybe they’re trying to add stuff or maybe things get too expensive and they have to drop some.”
The bottom line is, titles are changing constantly.
It’s a problem that has bothered librarians for a long time, McCracken said. He said it’s common to be working at the reference desk and not know, when asked by a customer, whether or not an article is available in the database.
Libraries have tried to track the information, but not had much success. One university, he said, is paying two and a half employees to do nothing but track the magazine titles in their databases. That, like other past attempts at monitoring the databases, seems inefficient to McCracken.
“There was actually a print product that would tell you what each database had, but it was in print so it was wrong the day it was published,” he said. “So what we do is track the information and provide Web pages to the libraries. We also provide a searchable database so they can search for a specific title instead of scrolling through all of them.”
The product has drawn attention across the country. McCracken has appeared on the cover of Library Journal – the magazine called him an “Emerging Leader” – which led to a congratulatory note from UW President Richard L. McCormick. All the recognition, he said, has been nice. But the best feeling is knowing that his fellow librarians like the product.
“That’s just about the best thing,” he said. “A lot of librarians really like it. We’ve gotten very positive feedback.”
For the near future, McCracken says he’ll continue working for the company, providing a valuable librarian’s perspective as they develop new products and services. But he also plans to stay at the UW. A flexible schedule on campus allows him to put in several evenings and one morning each week at Serials Solutions. That, he says, is plenty.
“People often ask me if I want to quit working as a librarian and go do this. It’s a tough spot, because it’s so exciting to have helped start this company. At the same time I love working in the library so much. I just can’t imagine not working here.”
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