The Catalog-Collection Connection

How titles in our Monthly Buyer’s Guides relate to our online product collections

Most of our customers have at one time or another been faced with the same situation: While looking through our monthly Buyer’s Guides, they come across a page that has several titles that they’re interested in purchasing—but how can they find this same grouping of titles on the Midwest Tape website?

Fortunately for this inquisitive shopper, we’re constantly looking for ways to keep our Buyer’s Guides connected to our site. Users can find many of the pages in our Buyer’s Guide on our website as well, formulated into collections.

This week, News and Views paid a visit to the Midwest Tape Marketing Department and talked to the people that are responsible for the Buyer’s Guides to get a clearer picture of what monthly features from each of the Buyer’s Guides are also available as collections on our website and how those collections can benefit you.

(Note: All the bolded words are keywords users can search in our SmartBrowse to view specific collections.)


DVDs
Barb Kaifas, DVD Marketing Supervisor
bkaifas@midwesttapes.com
We update our online collections monthly to correspond with our Buyer’s Guide. We separate the titles on our New Non-Fiction pages into Special Interest, Documentaries, and Fitness collections online, and our DVD New Releases can be found in the New Fiction collection. In addition, the TV on DVD Buyer’s Guide pages become a collection of the same name online.

Also, during award season, we always have pages dedicated to the major award ceremonies. Corresponding web collections can be found for the Buyer’s Guide pages that focus on the Academy, SAG, BAFTA, ALA, Spirit, Golden Globe, and Emmy Awards.

CDs
Mike Rankin, CD Marketing Supervisor
mrankin@midwesttapes.com

Each month in the Music Buyer’s Guide, we feature four sections that can be found as collections on the website.

The Hot New Releases pages, featuring new titles from RIAA-certified artists, and the Must Have pages, which include a further selection of titles that will surely be in demand, form a one-two punch that provides a complete listing of the top new titles for the month. The Trendsetters page—which is known as Music Buzz on the website and focuses on up-and-coming and under-the-radar artists—as well as the Chart Toppers pages, which track the titles that are burning up the charts, are also available online.

As with DVDs, all award-based sections from our Buyer’s Guide can be found on the web as well, including the Grammy, American Music (AMA), and Country Music Association (CMA) awards. In addition, any music festivals or seasonal previews that are featured in the Buyer’s Guide will also appear on the website.

Audiobooks
Erica Messinger, Audiobook Marketing Supervisor
emessinger@midwesttapes.com
We turn the first 17 pages of our Audiobook Buyer’s Guide—which include Hot New Releases (fiction), Hot New Nonfiction (Biographies, Self Help, and Non-fiction), and New & Notable (Up & Coming Fiction and Up & Coming Children’s)—into individual collections every month.

We update The New York Times Bestseller collection (NY Times Fiction), on the other hand, every week.

When reviewing our Audiobook Buyer’s Guide, as a rule of thumb, any catalog pages devoted to book lists, award nominees and winners, or book previews receive web collections devoted to them. Also, we archive our web collections quarterly; therefore, librarians have plenty of time to peruse their Buyer’s Guides and then shop for specific collections online.

Cat2Cart
For all three formats, our Cat2Cart section features a full collection of titles that are advertised in the current editions of the Buyer’s Guides. Upon selecting a specific format, all the titles within that Buyer’s Guide will load within SmartBrowse, wherein you can easily add titles to your cart.

Finding the Collections
You can easily access new titles as well as the Cat2Cart feature via the QuickLinks on our homepage. Also, you can keyword search any collection via the SmartBrowse feature.

Through our Browsing function, you can peruse titles within specific collections by first selecting which format you’re interested in.

Choose “Browse New Titles” for:

• DVDs’ New Releases and Hot New Releases;
• CDs’ Hit Makers, Must Haves, and Music Buzz;
• Audiobooks’ Hot New Releases and New York Times Bestsellers.

Choose “Browse by Collection” to view all other collections that we have developed based on pages within our monthly Buyer’s Guides.

How does this help me?
We specifically design our collections to serve as collection development tools that our customers can easily access and utilize. More and more, we hear of audiovisual librarians under constant pressure to innovate new and exciting collections that will draw patron interest. We hope that by presenting these collections in our Buyer’s Guides and making them readily available on our website, we can help alleviate some of that burden.

Do you shop from our Buyer’s Guide or web collections? Curious about these collections? Share your feedback and questions here as comments.