The remedies to this sort of situation will be limited by the contract that you have with the vendor. Your legal counsel will be best able to speak to that. In general, what will probably happen is that the vendor will place those boxes on research, declare them lost and pay you a dollar a box (or whatever their liability is). What I would suggest is that you ensure that they do not delete those box numbers from their system as "destroyed" and that they have a responsibility to report back to you if they "find" the boxes at any point in the future. After all, the vendor is the one here who can't account for the boxes. Whether or not the university has a cause of action is up to your attorneys. In many cases, "lost" boxes have been delivered elsewhere and get discovered at some future point in time when the other customer does an audit.
In general, this is not uncommon. I don't think that I have ever dealt with a commercial records center that didn't have "locationally challenged" boxes at some point. Moving out will always surface these issues. I've also done move outs where we identified a number of boxes that were delivered to us, but belonged to other customers.
With the numerous mergers and acquisitions of records centers over the past 20 years, many of the databases are in very bad shape. In some cases, the company that was acquired had a terrible tracking system. In some cases, the conversion went badly. In others, the people doing the work are to blame (boxes were not relabeled, not scanned, numbers were mis-keyed, etc.). I'm not playing the apologist for any commercial records center here, but there are many self-inflicted wounds caused by the massive number of mergers over a very brief period of time.
Patrick Cunningham, CRM
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"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759
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