Thanks for the clarifications, Rick. I sent my message out before seeing
your earlier one giving the right university. It's been a long time since
I thought about the presentation, hence the errors in memory.

Each institution has different needs and should make their own decision
about check-in. Here at Univ. of Oregon giving up check-in would at least
give us a stock answer--an out if you like--for all those notifications
from faculty and our public service colleagues asking why we haven't rec'd
something. Answer? "We haven't a clue."

If we could get buy-in from the folks that matter--catalog users, that
is--going this direction would certainly make a lot of acquisitions
headaches go away.

Mary

On Wed, 4 Aug 2004, Rick Anderson wrote:

> I'm going to stay faithful to my promise not to engage in this argument
> on-list, but I do want to remind everyone that we're the University of
> Nevada, Reno -- not Las Vegas.
>
> I'll also point out that our number of print journal subscriptions was
> probably about average for a medium-sized land grant institution, and
> that answers to most of Mary's concerns below can be found in the
> article.
>
> ----
> Rick Anderson
> Dir. of Resource Acquisition
> University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
> (775) 784-6500 x273
> rickand@unr.edu
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum
> > [mailto:SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU] On Behalf Of Mary Grenci
> > Sent: Wednesday, August 04, 2004 10:06 AM
> > To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU
> > Subject: Re: [SERIALST] dropping serial check-in?
> >
> > If I'm correctly remembering the workshop I attended awhile
> > ago, the Univ.
> > of Nevada-Las Vegas has very few print subscriptions compared to other
> > institutions its size. They rely much more on online
> > subscriptions which
> > (again, if I'm remembering correctly) are checked in. They stopped
> > check-in of print so they could concentrate on check-in and other
> > management actitivites for the largest and most expensive
> > part of their
> > periodical collection: the online subs. Also, I think
> > check-in of print
> > was taking much more time than it should have, much more than
> > it usually
> > does at other institutions, and this was one way around that problem.
> >
> > As for my thoughts on eliminating serial check-in:
> >
> > * If we rely on everybody in the serials chain remaining
> > honest, you must
> > still consider all the issues that don't arrive and that currently are
> > claimed. How many broken runs would you have? Do you care?
> > Would you still
> > expect to claim things, just at a later date? Not realistic, I think.
> >
> > * If we consider human nature might eventually take over,
> > what's to stop a
> > publisher or vendor from simply never sending a few issues
> > here and there,
> > knowing you won't notice until it's too late and that even
> > then you won't
> > be sure it wasn't rec'd? On the other side of the coin, how
> > could vendors
> > be confident that the claims that do come in are valid? They
> > will know the
> > library trend is to not check things in, so they will know you have no
> > idea whether something was received. Can we really expect
> > them to continue
> > to provide claimed issues in that environment? I think not.
> >
> > Granted, I don't think dishonesty and a lack of mutual trust
> > would be an
> > immediate problem.  The current environment of honesty and mutual
> > trust has built up over a number of years and won't
> > immediately go out the
> > window. I can see it happening in the future, though.
> >
> > * If it's wanted enough that you pay for it, you should make
> > sure you get
> > what you pay for. (Gift subs. are another matter and could be
> > considered
> > separately. Perhaps this is a category where eliminating
> > check-in wouldn't
> > have dire consequences.) If you don't care enough to make sure you get
> > your money's worth, stop buying it altogether.
> >
> > * If you do drop check-in of some or all of your print collection, you
> > should also drop all claiming of those titles.
> >
> > * If the unthinkable happens and this becomes a wider trend,
> > don't expect
> > vendors/publishers to change their claiming policies just because
> > libraries have tried to streamline. That would just be translating
> > our savings into added costs for them. It would be unfair to them and
> > would, in any case, result in higher subscription costs for libraries.
> >
> > Mary Grenci
> > Serials Team Leader & Metadata Librarian
> > Metada & Digital Library Services
> > University of Oregon Libraries
> > mgrenci@darkwing.uoregon.edu
> >
>