Aloha,

I'm trying to come up with a better way of handling records for those
pesky unwanted newsletters, reports, bulletins, etc. that are received
repeatedly as unsolicited gifts, or because we have a subscription to a
related title, etc.

We want to have records accessible to Serials Department staff, so that
the instructions which say "discard", "route to ...", or whatever are as
easy as possible to find.

To accomplish this, we currently display brief records in our PAC, with a
vague note where the call number would be (CONTROL FILE, to be exact),
meant to keep the public from knowing that we're throwing the stuff away.
Our instructions are hidden in a note underneath.

We do this because our system only allows title and word searches for
records filed to the public display. Some of these titles would be
impossible to find without a word search.

What are you doing in your library? Do you maintain a separate file? If
you include records in the public display, what does the public see? Or is
your system able to hide some records from the public?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Roberta Winjum
Head of Serials
University of Hawaii at Manoa Library
2550 The Mall
Honolulu, HI  96822
<robertaw@HAWAII.EDU>