---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 11:05:43 +0000
From: Tim Stedman <t.stedman@libr.canterbury.ac.nz>
Subject: Re: Claims study?

> At Midwinter, a vendor rep told me about a study he said had been done a
> few years ago by, I believe, a university in Maine, with the cooperation
> of a vendor. The study concerned the university library's serials claiming
> practices. The vendor rep told me that "over 90%" of the claims were
> "invalid"

While recognising that it is incumbent on librarians to keep their
automated systems up-to-date with publication information from
vendors, and to perform adequate checks before claiming, with the
best will in the world serials by their very nature are sufficiently
complex that I see it as a very important part of the claims
communication process to be able to clarify a wide variety of
uncertainties (such as were there 5 issues published in this volume
instead of 4, or is there still going to be a regular supplement
published with the June issue, or was no. 5 combined with no. 6, etc
etc).  So I would be very concerned if such claims were categorised
and thus dismissed or ignored as 'invalid'.  (Our experience has been
generally that our vendors are very good at supplying such
information, even if in some cases it can take a while!)

When I worked in the Serials Department here at the University of
Canterbury here in NZ I did a small study in 1997/98 on the
effectiveness of our claiming operation as part of my MLIS degree.
It was also useful for our department because we were shifting from a
manual claiming system to an automated claiming system at the time,
and we wanted to get an idea of reasonable
claim delay defaults for our automated system (Horizon), allowing for
surface mail delays and yet trying to avoid the publisher's cut off
date, a very difficult balancing act.  We ended up with defaults not
only for the differing frequencies, but also for special cases for
journals coming from 'problem publishers'.

It was a fairly limited study as it only looked at 4-6 months of
claiming activity,  I would be very happy to share a summary of the
findings, for what they're worth, with anybody interested,
particularly if you're in the Australia/NZ part of the world.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tim Stedman
Assistant Librarian (Electronic Information)
Information Services, University of Canterbury
Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand
Ph (64) 3 3667001 x8639 || Fx (64) 3 3642055
http://library.canterbury.ac.nz/infoserv/infoserv.shtml