Postal Service & Claiming (Cory Meyer) Marcia Tuttle 08 Jan 1998 20:22 UTC
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 8 Jan 1998 10:49:17 -0700 From: Cory Meyer <cmeyer@BIBLIO.UNM.EDU> Subject: Postal Service & Claiming To add to the discussion...... A few years ago our library changed it's name from UNM Medical Center Library to UNM Health Sciences Center Library. We notified our subscription vendors and they contacted the publishers to inform them of our name change. Shortly thereafter the Postal service changed their regulations and required the addition of a "street" address to all labels. That proved a problem for us since we are not located on a street...but within the campus environs. When publishers started to deny our claims, we were told that a street address was required by <their> postal branch. When we tried to confirm this with <our> postal branch we were told that no it did not apply to us since we had what is considered an institutional zip code with the final 4 digits of the nine digit zip being the signifier for our building. We again contacted our vendors and asked them to notify the publishers that the entire zip code had to be used. Now comes the fun part.....we still had an unusually high number of claims and I started to contact the publishers directly when problems developed. As part of the stantard routine I verified our address....in all cases the address was correct. Recently we started a totally unrelated project that required clipping the address labels from the issues and filing them since many of the online journals will require entry of a code that appears on the label. What we discovered was the journals were still coming to the old address. FEW OF THE ADDRESS LABELS HAD BEEN CHANGED TO MATCH OUR NEW ADDRESS BY THE PUBLISHERS...even though their <accounting> records had our new location. Added to this we now have the new problem that a few publishers have made the assumption that there is only one library at the University of New Mexico, and many of our titles are being sent to the main library while several of theirs are ending up at our facility. The problem appears to be more of an octopus than first appearance would have suggested. At this rate I will look forward to online if it would cut out all the middle men. Good Luck to us all!!!! Cory Anne Johnstone Meyer Head, Serials/Government Documents University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center Library Albuquerque, NM 87131-5686