First, to find out what I need to know...

Just having a look at my journals objective - I've pulled the manual for the LMS and it looks like a number of decisions need to be made. The main thing is to decide at what point to transfer claims from our system to our suppliers system. It is possible to set our system up to email the suppliers when items are a certain amount overdue BUT (and this is a very big but) my gut feeling is that the publication schedules for our journals are nowhere near constant enough to fully automate the process - I can see that somewhere down the line we'd be claiming for journals that haven't even been published.

A certain level of human (i.e. ME!) intervention will be needed. This is dull work but I will have to set aside regular time every week to do it if I'm going to get the journal collection anywhere near where I want it to be...

So what do I need to know?

Well I know that our system can produce reports of overdue copies once a week but I need to know how to do this and what parameters to set for the reports. This will need me to find out a bit about our suppliers claims policies - when do they act on a claim? - how long to leave it before claiming - when should I claim by?

I'll also need to review the prediction set on the system (these are set for most titles but my feeling is they are probably innacurate and will lead to spurious claims...).

So, there's a couple of sources I need to check-out - first is to read up on our journal supplier's policies. Second is to work out how to mesh our system into those policies to form a claiming procedure that works....