HARRASSOWITZ: Our Publisher’s Services


Established in 1872, HARRASSOWITZ has been serving libraries around the world for almost 150 years. We supply journals, books, e-journals, e-books, databases and music scores to over 9,000 customers worldwide. Our approval plan and standing order services deliver the choice and flexibility modern libraries demand

Our customers – libraries and publishers - value us for the quality and accuracy of our services and for our industry-leading and innovative solutions, and consistently identify us as an industry leader in terms of the quality, accuracy, and speed of our customer service. Overall, 98% of HARRASSOWITZ customers describe themselves as either “very satisfied” or “satisfied” .

HARRASSOWITZ was first certified for its commitment to high quality service by the International Standards Organization (ISO) in 2007. Our ISO certification assures our library and publisher partners they can rely on us knowing that we will continue to maintain the highest quality service in every area of our operation. HARRASSOWITZ staff is dedicated to delivering flexible, personal and efficient service both to our library customers and to our partners in publishing.

For academic and research libraries, we provide a comprehensive range of high-quality acquisitions and collection development support services.

Our experienced Publisher Relations team is dedicated to facilitating completeness of supply, efficient information exchange and smooth workflows between our publisher partners and our library customers, saving our publisher partners time and money. The team is constantly working to improve communication and workflows with publishers through onsite visits, correspondence, telephone contacts as well as personal meetings during conferences and fairs.

HARRASSOWITZ is having business relations with over 80.000 publishers worldwide.

We pride ourselves in hiring and retaining high-caliber, experienced staff, enabling us to understand and anticipate the needs and concerns of our customers, and to deliver the professional and reliable services they value. All members of our Publisher relations team are certified as librarians or booksellers and/or university-educated. All have many years’ information supply chain experience. HARRASSOWITZ staff as a whole speak a total of 20 languages and all are fluent in English.


Summary of Publisher Services: Marketing/Promotion

  1. We regularly send targeted promotions via our extensive library customer base, attend relevant exhibitions and International conferences, fairs and other events, and offer publisher partners on-site visits where a personal meeting is helpful.
  2. HARRASSOWITZ is providing Fokus, the HARRASSOWITZ system for acquisition and management of scholarly resources, free of charge to our customers in order to support the librarians in the management of their acquisitions.
    We increase visibility of our publisher partners’ products through regular data loads from national bibliographies into our online platform Fokus. In addition many titles are manually cataloged and entered into Fokus, including URL links to publisher websites, title sites, e-TOC sites, and licenses.
  3. We post notice of publishers’ special deals and offerings via the Special Offers web pages and through our popular HARRASSOWITZ News.
  4. In addition, our industry-leading New Title Announcement service reaches over 1,000 customers for monographs and monographic series.

Summary of Publisher Services: Technical/Communication

  1. We support ICEDIS, ONIX for Serials, and EDIFACT transactions to rapidly exchange business-critical data
  2. We ensure prompt, accurate, and courteous follow-up with publishers, wherever possible in the publisher’s native language (our staff speak 20 languages)
  3. We provide a range of useful analytical tools with a large variety of options (language, customer country, subject, etc.)
  4. We can conduct market intelligence and customer feedback surveys on behalf of publishers
  5. We can also facilitate consortia meetings with publisher representatives and consortium members

Value added services to Libraries

  1. Verification of customer title lists directly with publisher
  2. Title-by-title invoicing of publisher packages, both print and electronic formats
  3. EDI transactions for ordering, invoicing, and claiming

Publishers require a high quality, reliable information supply partner who understands their priorities, concerns and needs – and those of the institutions and patrons they serve. HARRASSOWITZ invites you to join the thousands of satisfied publishers around the world who benefit daily from our decades of industry experience, highly trained professional staff, immaculate record of financial stability, excellent industry relationships, latest ISO 9001:2008 certification, commitment to standards for data interchange and industry-leading technological infrastructure. For questions or additional information, please contact service@harrassowitz.de

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HARRASSOWITZ: Service. Quality. Integrity. Since 1872.