Many of our clients utilize our free Estimate service before placing an order. While we do our best to provide accurate turnaround times and costs, an estimate is just that, an estimate. Generally the estimates are about 99% accurate, but sometimes the end cost or turnaround time is not quite what we guessed, for multiple reasons.
Posted on January 11, 2017
Page span unknown. Some copyright fees are determined by how long the item is. If we are not provided a page range, it can make the copyright fee difficult to calculate. We will often use a default assumption of 10 pages. Additionally, if an item is over 30 pages long, we charge 25 cents per page after the first 30 pages. We might not know these facts until you approve the estimate and we are at the library, ready to copy the item. If these fees will be excessive we will update you before proceeding.
Copyright restrictions. Let’s say you’ve received your estimate and it includes a third-party vendor fee. This happens when an item isn’t located within our immediate library network but we can obtain it through an unaffiliated vendor. So you approve the additional charge, and we send the order details to our vendor. A few hours later we receive word from our vendor that they are unable to copy the item due to copyright restrictions. Or, perhaps the citation requested turns out to be an entire publication, and we do not provide entire publication copies, again, due to copyright restrictions.
Unknown variables. These are the aspects of document retrieval that we simply cannot control. As we prepare your estimate, we check library catalogs to ensure the item is in our network and we have access to it. But catalogs can be incorrect, or items can be lost within the library, or they can turn up “not-on-shelf.” In these cases, we will reroute the item to another library, but this unfortunately delays retrieval. Though infrequent, weather also has been known to hinder timely delivery.
So you can see that there are all kinds of variables we have to juggle when preparing your free estimate. We do the best we can but there are always aspects that we cannot anticipate or control. If you have any further questions about estimates or would like to request an estimate, please send us an email directly to [email protected].
