Steve, I believe that vendor rep's information is 15-25 years old! Invalid
claims were rampant in the early days of automated serials systems, when
the system produced actual printed claims. Today, as you said, the systems
produce claim lists, which are reviewed by a staff member before the
actual claims are forwarded. Of course, the percentage of invalid claims,
even today, depends on the quality of the review, but I don't believe
there is the same problem as in the 70s and early 80s.

I did find a citation for an article by Frank Clasquin of a Faxon study in
the early 1970s, in which he found 74 percent of claims to be invalid. I'm
sure at that time the overwhelming share of claims were manually-produced.
And perhaps the low classification usually given a claimer position was a
factor. The article is "The Claim Enigma for Serials and Journals," in
_Management Problems in Serials Work_ (Westport CT: Greenwood Press,
1974), the proceedings of a conference held in Florida.

I have never heard of the study by a library in Maine, but I would be very
interested in learning about it, if it truly is recent.

Marcia Tuttle
Chapel Hill NC
marcia_tuttle@unc.edu