Buddy,
We are another medium-sized university library that continues to claim, and
when we gather a list (bi-monthly to quarterly), I do report the number of
issues on the list.  That is rarely the actual number of claims we place
with the vendor(s) because we check for delayed notes, mailed dates, and
previous claims before we enter a new claim with the vendor(s).  There are a
multitude of reasons why a particular issue should not be immediately
claimed.  So I also report how long it takes the paraprofessional and
student to enter and follow up on the claiming process as well.

Christina Torbert
Head of Serials & Assistant Professor
J.D. Williams Library
University of Mississippi
ctorbert@olemiss.edu
662-915-7059
662-915-6744 fax

-----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.