Periodical Receipt Problems PIONESSA@ARIZRVAX.BITNET 26 Jul 1991 21:19 UTC
Here at the University of Arizona Library in Tucson, we have a problem that recurs at various times of the year in receipt of popular magazines, and I would like to hear from others who may have the same or similar problems. Many of our popular, glossy magazines such as Esquire, Atlantic, Business Week, Forbes, New Republic, Macleans, Paris- Match, and others too numerous to mention, as well as some of our more heavily used newspapers, such as Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, Arizona Republic, stop coming, sometimes for several weeks or months in a row, and then we will receive several back issues at one time. Claiming the missing issues does not seem to help, since many times the back issues will arrive just before we are ready to claim, or, if we do claim somewhat early, we will then receive duplicates of the claimed issues. This problem has occurred for the past two or three years and usually during the Christmas season and then during the summer months, which led us to believe that it was a local problem with our central shipping and receiving on campus, which may be short staffed at those particular times of the year. However, recent consultation with the campus mail departments has shown that there is no way they could be causing a backlog of magazines, since their turn-around time is about 24-48 hours maximum, and they do not have the space to store such items even if they wanted to. One possibility to account for our problem is the publisher's or fulfillment house's policy of bundling together many issues being mailed to the same geographical area (supposed to be same zip code area?) to take advantage of Postal Service discounts. As you can imagine, if an issue starts out in the wrong bundle, it may take up to a week for it to be discovered and corrected. However, this does not account for the fact that we may miss several issues in a row and then get the current issue on time, and at a later time receive all the missing issues at once. Another possibility that has occurred to us is that our vendors may be waiting until the last minute to pay renewal invoices, thus causing lapses in subscriptions, which are later corrected by the publishers when the invoices are finally paid. We do not wish to blame particular vendors, but we are interested in solving this problem which is a major headache for both technical services and public services. Our users find it difficult to believe that we do not have recent issues which they have seen on the newsstands and which they may need for research on current topics. I would appreciate any information that others may like to share on this topic, including whether or not they have the same or similar problems, and possible solutions. Replies may be sent to the list or directly to me, and if there seems to be enough interest, I will summarize for the list. Thanks in advance. Gerry Pionessa Current Periodicals, Newspapers, and Microforms University of Arizona Library Tucson, AZ BITNET: pionessa@arizrvax INTERNET: pionessa@ccit.arizona.edu VOICE: (602) 621-4876