{"id":202,"date":"2015-01-16T16:30:27","date_gmt":"2015-01-16T21:30:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/professionaldevelopment\/?p=202"},"modified":"2015-03-20T11:03:20","modified_gmt":"2015-03-20T15:03:20","slug":"fil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/professionaldevelopment\/2015\/01\/16\/fil\/","title":{"rendered":"Operational Trip: Book buying trip at Feria Internacional de Libros (FIL)\/International Book Fair at Guadalajara, Mexico"},"content":{"rendered":"

From November 29th<\/sup> to December 4th<\/sup>, I had the opportunity to attend FIL in Guadalajara, Mexico, the biggest book fair in the Americas and the second biggest in the world (the biggest is in Germany, the Frankfurt International Book Fair). I was able to attend partly thanks to ALA-FIL travel grant<\/a>, which paid for hotel, book fair registration and breakfast, and our library which support me by paying for airfare.<\/p>\n

ALA has for many years partnered with the Mexican government and the FIL coordinators to bring American librarians, both from the public and academic sector, to the fair as a way to improve the quality of American libraries by being able to buy directly, not only from Mexican publishers, but also from publishers from all over Latin America, the Caribbean and even Europe and Asia.<\/p>\n

It has been almost two years since my last visit to the FIL so I have a lot to catch up in the buying department. Because I arrived during the weekend I was able to get an early start. First thing I did was to visit the stands of several Central American countries. Central American countries (Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nicaragua, etc.) had small print runs so if you don\u2019t get their books early they may run out before you have visited their stand! My diligence paid off and I was able to acquire several interesting books from novels to social sciences studies about immigration, politics, economy and gender and human rights issues. Other country that I visited early was Peru which had several books I wanted. Unfortunately, I couldn\u2019t buy all of them in my first day since some of them were not ready for sale. One of the major activities at the book fair was to present new books\u2014there were 590 of such presentations\u2014with a formal ceremony and a discussion leaded by experts of the field who discussed the value of the book to the public. After the ceremony, you can buy the book\u2014which I did!<\/p>\n

Because the fair is so huge\u2014the convention center is the size of a football stadium\u2014 and there were so many stands\u20141,945 publishers attended the fair\u2014 I decided to plan my week based on the countries I wanted to visit and not to spend all my budget in one day. During my visit I bought books from Cuba, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Chile and Peru on such subjects as immigration, gender studies, social justice, human rights, social movements, labor and literature. In addition, I asked my Mexican distributor to make a selection of Mexican books sold only in the FIL\u2014since Mexico by itself take over half of the convention center!<\/p>\n

I think this strategy helped me focused on the countries we don\u2019t purchase many books because of cost and\/or availability, while my distributor used a purchasing profile for Mexico that I gave him so he could acquire the type of materials my users need. This profile is based on the feedback I received from my constituents about their research and teaching needs in Latin American & Caribbean Studies, Anthropology, History, Political Sciences, Human Rights and Spanish. I have profiles for each country that we have consistently acquired materials through the years, and I have added new countries as new faculty and research interests had shifted since I started working in 2007. Using these profiles, I made purchases decisions trying my best to balance between \u201cjust in case\u201d and \u201cjust in time\u201d philosophies while at the book fair.<\/p>\n

Just to give you an idea of the size and the amount of people that attend this book fair, here are some figures from the FIL website<\/a> for this 2014 book fair.<\/p>\n