I will start the line of librarians....
If you are relying on the paper file, rather than using it as a supplement to an electronic of microfilm subscription, you must claim. You will therefore catch missing issues, which occur in maybe 1 or 2 % of the ti tles each year, typically the important ones. You will, even more important, catch subscriptions that have stopped arriving.
If you aren't claiming, you have apparently made the decision that it doesn't matter whether the users find the article they want or not. In that case, why are you even subscribing?
It is probably a valid generalization, not just in serials, that we can greatly diminish our workload by ignoring the needs of the users. I once worked for a library that wouldn't let the patrons plac e holds or recalls.
The workload can be reduced by knowing what not to claim, and marking your records accordingly. Some periodicals cannot be claimed effectively, such as many from the third world or published out of the no

rmal trade channels. Some ar e valuable for the currrent issue only and will soon be replaced.  And some you will have learned come from publishers who never respond satisfactorily.

Dr. David Goodman
Princeton University Library
and
Palmer School of Library & Information Science, Long Island University
dgoodman@princeton.edu

----- Original Message -----
From: Rick Anderson <rickand@UNR.EDU>
Date: Tuesday, January 7, 2003 12:27 pm
Subject: Routine claiming (was RE: Faxon/Rowecom/divine)

> At the risk of starting another rowdy discussion thread, Amanda,
> you may
> also want to take a critical look at the necessity of routine
> claiming at
> all.  Remember that routine claims onl y help in the small
> percentage of
> cases where the claimed issue is not simply late, and that the
> benefit of
> claiming is counterbalanced to some degree by the staff time it
> absorbs and
> the duplicate copies it often generates.  This is not to say that
> claimingis never necessary,

 of course, but if you're seriously
> considering going
> direct with all (or even the majority) of your subscriptions,
> you're going
> to need to take a very hardheaded look at the costs and benefits of
> all y our
> serials operations. At my institution, we eliminated routine
> claiming about
> 18 month s ago, and the sky has yet to fall.
>
> Now, brace yourself: you're about to get a bunch of messages from
> librarianswarning you not to listen to that dangerous crank from
> Reno... :-)
>
> -------------
> Rick Anderson
> University of Nevada, Reno
> rickand@unr.edu
> √