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Routine claiming (was RE: Faxon/Rowecom/divine) Rick Anderson 07 Jan 2003 17:27 UTC

At the risk of starting another rowdy discussion thread, Amanda, you may
also want to take a critical look at the necessity of routine claiming at
all.  Remember that routine claims only help in the small percentage of
cases where the claimed issue is not simply late, and that the benefit of
claiming is counterbalanced to some degree by the staff time it absorbs and
the duplicate copies it often generates.  This is not to say that claiming
is never necessary, of course, but if you're seriously considering going
direct with all (or even the majority) of your subscriptions, you're going
to need to take a very hardheaded look at the costs and benefits of all your
serials operations. At my institution, we eliminated routine claiming about
18 months ago, and the sky has yet to fall.

Now, brace yourself: you're about to get a bunch of messages from librarians
warning you not to listen to that dangerous crank from Reno... :-)

-------------
Rick Anderson
University of Nevada, Reno
rickand@unr.edu