After this message, I promise to hold my virtual tongue.

What I encourage everyone to do is take a hard-nosed look at the costs
and benefits of all serials-management practices in your libraries.
Every traditional practice (including check-in, binding, and routine
claiming) has value.  The problem is that you don't have enough
resources to do everything that's valuable; therefore, you are always
foregoing some valuable task.  The question is: are you setting
priorities consciously and rationally, or are you allowing them to be
set by tradition and inertia (or by the fact that print issues get in
your face, while online issues don't)?

The danger of routine claiming for print is that it takes up valuable
time that could be spent on tasks that have greater value.  The
cost-benefit balance for this task, as for any other, will vary somewhat
from institution to institution (as Lisa Blackwell points out below), as
well as from title to title (as Richard points out).  The goal shouldn't
be to do more or less of any particular task; the goal should be to
provide maximum benefit to your patrons within the constraints of the
resources available to you.

---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dir. for Scholarly Resources & Collections
Marriott Library
University of Utah
rick.anderson@utah.edu
801-721-1687

> -----Original Message-----
> From: SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum
> [mailto:SERIALST@list.uvm.edu] On Behalf Of Gillert, Richard
> Sent: Monday, January 26, 2009 8:05 AM
> To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU
> Subject: Re: [SERIALST] Claiming not worth it? (RE:
> [SERIALST] futile claiming)
>
> One problem that we have encountered is that some titles do
> not send us any issues until we claim them.  We may go three
> or four months without receiving any issues, but when we
> claim them, they send the whole batch.  For the past couple
> of years we also seem to have dropped of the radar for some
> titles.  We will get them routinely, and then all of a
> sudden, they stop.  Once we claim them, they start again.  We
> also have found that Ad Age weeklies are rather
> unpredictable.  We probably get half of them, but since we do
> not retain weeklies as long, we are not as concerned about them.