Perspectives:
Campus Mail Services uses modern technolgy

Current faculty and staff members are invited to contribute their essays to Perspectives. In choosing from submissions, the editorial staff will be guided by the campus community's need to be informed about matters related to university governance and institutional improvement. Because of limited space, submissions are subject to editing. Each contribution will appear under a byline.

The volume of outbound letters and parcels that is processed through campus Mail Services can be compared to that of a post office in a small city. Approximately 14,500 letters and parcels are processed daily, which means about 3.8 million pieces of mail are handled in a year's time. Broken down, that number is approximately 5,100 incoming, 8,200 outbound and 1,200 intercampus pieces handled daily.

Fresno State's automated processing of external and internal mail has been lauded by the CSU system. Four CSU campuses -Long Beach, Chico, Cal Poly Pomona and San Jose State - in association with the Chancellor's Office, launched a Distribution Delivery Services Study by touring the Printing and Mail Services area to observe its operations. Representatives from these four campuses saw how this campus automates its outbound First Class Mail and the "Standard A," or bulk mail, through its Multi-Line Optical Character Reader (MLOCR). The operations were identified by the CSU as "best practice." Fresno State is the only campus in the CSU system that does not use a pre-sort vendor, and this means substantial savings to the campus.

Other CSU campuses - Sonoma State, Stanislaus, and Sacramento - visited Mail Services earlier and have already implemented or are now in the process of implementing their own method of mail automation based on the information and practices developed by Fresno State.

Printing and Mail Services offers a complete service that includes printing, folding, inserting, labeling and mailing. Once a job is submitted, it is taken through these steps and delivered to the U.S. Post Office without the department having to handle the job again. Many campus departments have taken advantage of this service since it began several years ago. Mailing lists may be e-mailed to Printing Services as an attachment or submitted on a disk. Lists also may be sent from the campus mainframe. Addresses can be corrected by Printing Services to standardize the format for automation. Locally automated bulk mail arrives at its destination at the same speed as First Class Mail, but with a cost that is much less.