You are not in a position to declare authoritatively what the question is or is not, and I never suggested that people not review their procedures.
Your direct labor costs can be readily measured. Your opportunity cost is obscure.
Your aggregate investment in man-hours will decline as your portfolio of subscriptions declines. There are not any sunk costs associated with the mere adoption of the procedure. You might conceptualize the hiring of staff as a sunk cost, but you propose to re-deploy them.
Not remarking issues as they arrive and failing to make periodic complaints to your agency over issues not delivered is an indication that you have, in a rough-and-ready way, elected to write-off part of the inventory for which you have paid. The only circumstance in which such a measure of indifference is not present would be one in which you have determined that such reviews have no effect on whether issues arrive or not; that is a rather heroic assumption (and incongruent with my personal experience, FWIW).
IW
On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 4:21 PM, Rick Anderson
<rick.anderson@utah.edu> wrote:
> I think if you are indifferent as to whether the paper subscriptions you order
> arrive and indifferent to the condition of the issues over time, by all means
> cease these activities.
The question isn't whether one cares about the receipt of paper
subscriptions. The question is whether traditional check-in and claiming
processes make enough difference to justify their cost -- and remember that
we're not just talking about the relatively modest direct labor cost, but
also the much more important opportunity cost. When staff members invest
time in the creation of records that don't matter (such as those that catch
changes in frequency, or show that the April issue arrived on April 7) or
when they spend time submitting claims for issues that are going to come
whether you claim them or not (or that won't come no matter how many times
you claim), then you've got a problem. How big the problem is, and whether
the right solution is to stop those activities, are questions that each
individual institution should investigate and answer locally. But no one
should shy away from the question based on the suggestion that to question
those practices constitutes indifference to one's responsibilities.
Actually, I'd argue that just the opposite is true: failure to review the
costs and benefits of traditional practices reflects indifference to
patrons.
--
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dir. for Scholarly Resources & Collections
Marriott Library
Univ. of Utah
rick.anderson@utah.edu
(801) 721-1687
--
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Serials Desk
Colgate University Libraries
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