Kgabi gave some general information about her University and her Library. The University of the North is located in a rural area of northern South Africa and was established in 1960 to serve disadvantaged groups of several South African communities. This University and its' library are very similar to universities and academic libraries in the United States. The books in Kgabi's library are cataloged using the Dewey Decimal system and the serials are arranged alphabetically. The library contains 168,000 volumes and most of their books are purchased from the United States. In recent years, their purchasing power has declined because the value of their currency has dropped.

The Eureka Automated System was implemented in 1985 and is being used for acquisitions, but they were never able to bring up the serials module. Automation has eliminated the intensive labor for some of the acquisitions jobs. Kgabi's library will be migrating to Innovative Interfaces, Inc. in January of 2000. They use an online utility, Subnet, which is similar to OCLC. An electronic classroom has been established and many of their faculty have Internet access. Kgabi warned that it is not advisable to purchase a module just because the system has it since it may not work for your library.

The acquisitions department of the University of the North is divided into two divisions, each headed by a librarian. Future plans call for them to improve their acquisitions procedures with the Innovative Interfaces, Inc. system and they play to include online ordering, allocation of funds to departments and more frequent claiming which will result in more complete bound volumes. Today they have 50 CD ROMS and many e-journals. In fact, 14% of the acquisitions budget is spent on e-journals.

Several problems they are currently working on include proof of receipt of e-journals for audit purposes and the question of whether or not they can lend e-journal articles through Inter-Library Loan. Staff need to be continually trained to keep up to date but they find they are no longer working in isolation but cooperating more within the library.

In this program, Kgabi, gave a good overview of her Acquisitions Division and how automation has affected her staff. It was also clear from the presentation how similar her library acquisitions unit is to those in colleges and universities in the United States.