Re: Claims study? (Tim Stedman) Marcia Tuttle 18 Feb 1999 23:43 UTC
---------- 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