I would like offer up our experience in not checking in serials. 

 

We stopped checking in our print serials about 4 years ago.  We had about 1200 titles – less now with cancellations.  We continued to check in around 100 titles – expensive and high use titles.  Issues would come into the library, through the mail, and go directly to the current periodical shelves.

 

I started to hear from the serials technician that her claims were starting to really increase and her incomplete binds also increased.  We decided to continued to bind volumes and decided to bind incomplete if we could not get the missing issue through claims.  Remember, you are only claiming at the time of binding or when someone asks why you don’t have an issue – before that you have to assume you are getting your issues.  This became a real problem because by the time we went to claim, issues were often not available or were outside our window of claiming without cost.

 

This is what we found.  By the way, we have a good vendor, Swets, and they would get us missing issues if they could.  The biggest problems – lack of inventory by publishers and when they had inventory  - the cost of a single issue was often very high.

 

During 2010/11 our Library sent approx. 2,000 volumes to be bound (average number for previous years).  During the fiscal 2010-2111, the Library tried to claim 605 issues from publishers.   We did not keep the numbers (sigh, wish we had!) so we do not know how many of the ones we actually were able to get were ones that costs us more money but our technician did say that there were many instances where claims were filled by re-buying issues from the publisher.  Of the items bound, 290 volumes had to be bound incomplete; that is, issues were not successfully claimed, most often because of availability.  So out of around 2,000 volumes – 290 were bound incomplete.

 

That means that 15% of our binding was incomplete for that year.   So on several fronts this was a concern to me.  First, the amount of time my technician was spending on claiming, second, how much money we were spending on getting issues we had already paid for and last it seems like we had some fiscal responsibility to ensure we were getting the materials we were paying for.

 

Bottom line.  We have started to check in our serials again.  Weighing the cost of check in again the cost for time spent claiming and for the cost of re-buying issues…we have started checking in again.  At least we now have less titles to work on – last count was around 500 or so.

 

Another option – vendors are now starting to provide check in for their clients.  Not sure of costs – we decided to do it inhouse.

 

 

Shelley

 

Shelley Hawrychuk  Hon. B.A., MLIS

 

Collection Development Coordinator

 

Subject Librarian for CCT, Drama, English, Economics,

Government Documents, Reference, Sociology

Hazel McCallion Academic Learning Centre

University of Toronto Mississauga

3359 Mississauga Rd

Mississauga, Ontario, Canada

L5L 1C6

905-569-4365

shelley.hawrychuk@utoronto.ca

 

P please consider the environment before printing this email

 

 

 

 

 

And of course I meant “…some libraries got along okay without checking in journal & magazine receipts.”

 

 

 

It’s always interesting when someone new asks about this. Here’s (I hope) the SERIALST archive place for 23 posts about ceasing check-in:

 

http://list.uvm.edu/cgi-bin/wa?S2=SERIALST&q=stop+check+in&s=&f=&a=&b=

 

It’s been awhile since I last looked at these, but I seem to remember that some libraries got along okay with checking in journal & magazine receipts.

 

Rich Crank
Serial Records Team, Acquisitions/Serials Dept.
KU Libraries

University of Kansas
(785) 864-8944
rcrank@ku.edu

 

 

From: SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum [mailto:SERIALST@list.uvm.edu] On Behalf Of Coakley, Lynn
Sent: Monday, July 02, 2012 3:02 PM
To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU
Subject: [SERIALST] checkin question

 

 

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