We've had most serials operations automated (using NOTIS) for some time.
However, one area I see as particularly troublesome (perhaps because we've
been short-handed and I volunteered to help with check-in) is how to
automate or otherwise simplify finding of information about unsolicited
titles which we have decided to discard upon receipt.

We have quite a few of these titles, which tend to get mixed up with the
samples, stray issues belonging to someone else, etc.  I suspect it is
because there are so many of them, and most of them are newsletter-type,
that newsletter-type publications tend to get set aside and handled last
in check-in.  The only current access to these titles is a single card
for each, kept in alphabetical order in a set of old card boxes.  This was
somewhat functional when we checked-in at the Kardex, but requires a separate
set of procedures now.  Of course, there has been little effort made to keep
the files current (cessations, title changes, etc.) and there is no alternative
access provided (e.g. association when entry is under title).

We talked to automation about setting them up in an alternative processing
unit (like government documents) but found there was no way to keep them
out of the indexes--library users would see entries in the indexes even
though they could not call up records for these index entries.  This seemed
confusing to us.

General wisdom in the library is that we shouldn't enter these titles in the
OPAc because it would be bad PR if users found out there were titles we were
receiving and tossing.  (We do have OPAC entries for a number of newsletters
we keep for only one year.)

How do other libraries handle these items?  Many of them seem to be "come-withs"
   (i.e. a newsletter received because of a subscription to a journal we want).
Does anyone write to publishers and ask not to be sent X anymore?  Does anyone
have an easy way of identifying these titles (other than the most frequent) to
check-in personnel?  Any help will be appreciated.

Thomas Sanders, Serials, Auburn University, AL (tsanders@auducvax)