Grand Forks AFB, ND intends to issue a five year service contract for the lease of books, dvds, and other learning materials from Mcnaughton Books.

5. A demonstration that the proposed contractor's unique qualifications or the nature of the acquisition requires use of the authority cited.
In order to use a different vendor, the library staff would have to take all of the current collection off the shelf, remove the records from the on-line catalog, pack the books up, mail them back to McNaughton, select a new core collection, in process the new books, and add the new books to the on-line catalog. All of this will cost time(about 340 hours) and money(over $4,000.00 depending on time required of different level employees with wages ranging from $7.80/hour to $26.07/hour) to accomplish. An additional factor is the resulting decrease in customer satisfaction. During the 3-6 months that it will take to transfer to another rental plan, the library customers will be without the current best sellers and popular fiction, nonfiction, biographies, audio and DVD titles. Because materials acquired under this contract account for a significant percentage of our daily checkout, this would have a definite impact on customer service which
will lead to valid customer complaints.

Monthly Cost of Comparable Purchase: As the cost of an individual item can vary several dollars each, I can only estimate a monthly cost to purchase adult/young adult/children's books obtained through the McNaughton contract at between $950 and $1025. That would mean an annual range of $11,400 to $12,300. Audio books vary in cost from about $30 for an abridged title to $150 for an unabridged title. Average monthly cost would be about $350. Average cost of a DVD is $29.00 for a monthly purchase cost of $290.00. Total monthly purchase cost for all portions of the McNaughton contract would average $1,590.00 to $1,665.00.

Retention: The McNaughton hardcover adult/young adult contract and the audio contract also include a 30% retention - this means that approximately 30% of the items we lease in those contract segments we get to choose to keep as permanent additions to the collection at no additional cost. This is a big bonus in that we can have titles that are very popular for only a short time and return but then retain permanently in our collection items that remain popular or are important titles.

Additional replacement cost: If we were to end the McNaughton contract for our audio items, most of them would need to be returned. The cost to rebuild that collection through purchase would be very large considering some of the items are between $100 and $150 each. Multiply that individual cost by the total items (approximately 260) in that collection and the cost could well be over $22,000.

There are currently 750 titles in our McNaughton book lease holdings. Considering the average cost of a book is now about $30.00, the replacement purchase cost for that collection could be over $22,500 if the items are even still available in print.

Another possible aspect to remember is that McNaughton pays all of the shipping costs. Books can be heavy and many other vendors would include shipping costs on the items. I do not have an estimate of the savings that is part of our McNaughton contract

Bid Protests Not Available