Our library subscribes to c. 3000 periodical titles, worth about $450,000.
A full-time technician manages the periodical titles. She orders new titles,
makes title changes, checks the yearly renewal invoices from Faxon and UMI
for accuracy and claims issues we haven't received. Although this clerk
has 17 years experience, and one time had control of standing orders too,
she can no longer keep up with the claiming. She doesn't go to the shelves
except for Alaska related titles (actually a student helps her out 10
hours per week). She generates a claim report on Microlinx once/month
and it takes her about 3 days to go through it, then she generates a
file which is transmitted via the Internet to Faxon. She runs /remind
notices daily on our opac, where we have a number of titles checked
in there.

Being new to the field of seriodicals and acquisitions, I am currently
unable to figure out why this consumes all of her time. I took a field
trip to the public library which subscribes to about 600 periodicals.
Their clerk spends about 3 hours/week attending to claims, and
even has time to check materials in.

I would like to know if this is typical? I think if this person were
more organised and collected less paper (such as duplicate mailing
labels) we could get this under better control. Not having the time
to do her job for a time to figure out where the holdup is, I wonder
if there is a more efficient way of attending to these. We aren't
claiming dailies unless we microfilm them ourselves. We don't worry
about those titles that will soon be replaced on fiche, or free or gift
titles. Any advice anyone can provide me would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Debbie Kalvee, Head, Bibliographic Access Management
Elmer E. Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks
FFDHK@aurora.alaska.edu