Hello Buddy,
I claim every week, as well. Our ILS (Horizon) generates a list for me,
which I manually check, then send via ftp to our vendor.  The titles not
from that vendor are claimed by phone or email, and I record that on a
homemade Excel sheet.  I do not keep totals, but our vendor has a
claimchecker of all I have sent that I monitor every week, as well. This
is not a perfect but ok method.

I have heard that others do not claim anymore.  I guess if your
subscriptions are to print+online and you don't get a particular print
issue, it doesn't matter to some.  We are a small private university
with a smallish collection (about 400 titles) and to me it would not be
fiscally responsible NOT to try to get everything we pay for, especially
with prices as they are. That said, I don't have 100 percent success in
claiming even though it does absorb plenty of time.

Please let me know what success you have with automating your statistics
collection, especially if you are collecting use statistics. Even though
we are small, this process is very cumbersome and old-fashioned, as we
do it, and would love to automate it, as well.

Do you think you have good success with your claims?  If you total data,
you certainly would be able to determine a numerical success rate, which
would be a big plus, I think.

Karen Bolton
Serials Librarian
bolton@msoe.edu

Milwaukee School of Engineering
Walter Schroeder Library
1025 N. Broadway
Milwaukee, WI
53202-3109

-----Original Message-----
From: SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum
[mailto:SERIALST@list.uvm.edu] On Behalf Of Pennington, Buddy D.
Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2008 8:48 AM
To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU
Subject: [SERIALST] Serials claims measures

Hi all,

We claim on a weekly basis and continue to manually tally the number of
claims sent to our agents.  Our Innovative ILS tallies the total sent
each week and our serials assistant then totals those weekly tallies by
hand for a monthly total.

We've made a push to automate our statistics collection, and I was
thinking that we might switch from claims sent to # of claimed issues as
a monthly measure of the work we have done for claiming late issues.  We
could easily collect the number of claimed issues for the month using
Innovative's Create Lists function.

I was wondering a couple of things:

1.     How many libraries continue to claim late issues? I have heard
that a number of libraries have given this up.

2.     If so, how do you measure that work?  Claims sent?  Does anyone
measure it in the way I described above?

Thanks all!

Buddy Pennington
Serial Acquisitions Librarian
University of Missouri - Kansas City
University Libraries

800 E. 51st Street

Kansas City, MO  64110

816-235-1548

UMKC University Libraries: Discovery. Knowledge. Empowerment.