The wonderful news for December is that the Authorities Unit met their goal of finishing the Split Headings Report (Error 9 list) that they have been working on since conversion to Sirsi. The dates on the reports are 7/28/96 and 7/31/96 so this project has been underway (on and off) for five and a half-years. Congratulations and thanks!

The Tech Services Workflow Task Force met once and looked at charts for Serials and Periodicals workflow that Mary Ellen Wilson and Zora Breeding had prepared.

The Inventory Reduction Task Force held its second meeting at which plans for using OCLC’s Retrocon-batch service were discussed. Current tentative plans include using this service to identify new or updated records for cataloging inventory books stored in the Annex.

The addition of security strips at the bindery for serials and periodicals necessitated a modified online invoice processing procedure. On the 7th, Mary Ellen Wilson met with Machelle Keen and Karen Pillow in Binding and Marking to look at how the new charges for security stripping on Heckman invoices could be posted in Acorn.

Sue Davis is happy to report that the annual ARL preservation statistics questionnaire was completed--and only a few days late.

The RS Management team synthesized the Staff Satisfaction Survey discussion this month into several action items.

Several staff attended the Reports in Workflows training given by Anne Laws.

December 10-14, everyone participated in another week of Cost Study.

A temporary student hire provided an extra boost to Preservation during the holiday weeks when the regular student assistant was taking finals and vacation time. Preservation expects to see the return of their regular student in the spring semester. Debbie Williams from Order Services continued to assist the team in binding processing as did Linda Davis from RS Maintenance.

Juanita Murray treated all those, including Daphne Walker, Charlotte Lew, and Sue Davis, who worked on the University of Nashville sorting and cleaning project to a lunch at a nearby restaurant. It was a nice reward for a difficult project.

Staff enjoyed holiday luncheons and parties during December. Many people took some vacation time. Among the best of these celebrations was the Order Services cookie/recipe exchange to share our best holiday cookie recipes. And lots of cookies, too.

As a member of the screening committee, Sue Davis participated in the interview of the third candidate for the Special Collections archivist position. Several staff attended the candidate presentation.

December 20th, Peg Earheart sent 10 Library Annex samples to Mary Charles Lasater for a Cataloging/Authorities project that could begin in early January. The project involves 921 Peabody College – Specialist in Education dissertations that are awaiting retrospective conversion. These materials transferred ownership from the Education vault to become the property of Special Collections a couple of years ago. They are housed at the Library Annex.

457 items circulated to campus

206 of our patrons placed their Annex requests via the Web

14 Inter-Library Loan patrons requested articles to be photocopied, for which we reproduced 115 pages

Another 11 ILL requests had to be declined due to the fragility of the material

9 items requested, by local patrons, were searched and found to have incorrect citations, or were titles the Annex never owned

Item retrieval became rather interesting at semester's end. Even nearing the end of the exam period, we continued to receive several "last minute" or "I need this ASAP" circulation requests, some with rather "iffy" citations.

Joe Collins reports that December did not bring an unusually high number of returned books to re-shelve. It had its peaks and valleys, but not the avalanche we had anticipated.

We still haven't received the first Faculty Delivery Request for an Annex stored volume. However, we did receive multiple undergraduate and graduate student requests to have volumes sent to a specified library. Clint Grantham served on the CAG subcommittee that proposed this delivery of patron specified library requests. The subcommittee also officially proposed the delivery of Annex journal articles by fax, to Vanderbilt patrons. Annex staff are extremely pleased to eventually be able to offer this service.

1867 Acorn records edited

321 withdrawals processed

6 Central volumes re-instated

1 title reconned

8 intra-campus library transfers

Linda Davis worked on 2 deadline groups of Bindery patterns. She edited Acorn for Central Periodicals, Central serials, Govt. Information titles, and Science serials.

Leonor Van Cotthem continued to work on the Microfiche stamping. There are many 1000's of fiche still to stamp and it will take a while to catch up on the backlog. Some new stamps are being ordered to help more efficiently stamp the fiche.

Clint Grantham spent considerable time working with the Education brief records project. This included asking for retention decisions, bringing in OCLC records, and forwarding items that require original input.

82.5 linear feet of new transfers were received from Central, Law, Mngt., PColl, Science and Engineering, and VColl. Science wins the prize for the most new transfers.

Peg Earheart met with Central Business Group in regards to first floor shelving needs. A purchase order for a new bank of Library Annex compact shelving was initiated. Although our vendor was still awaiting the P.O. on Dec. 31st, we are now closer to the order for the actual manufacturing to occur.

Meanwhile, we worked towards relocation of materials stored in the square footage space that will be taken over by the new electronic ranges. This space includes faculty and staff non-library University storage, Robinson Collection boxes, Chancellor Wyatt filing cabinets, Special Collections and University Archives. David Stringfellow, Hosanna Banks, and Kathy Smith have been a tremendous help in relocating countless filing cabinets of their materials.

A moratorium on any further leased space/transfer of new, boxed storage by Alumni & Development (now called Institutional Planning and Development), Law faculty members, the Legal Clinic, and the Owen School faculty has been implemented. John Carter Moving Company brought more filing cabinets for the Legal Clinic on Dec. 21st. These materials arrived before the Dec.31st moratorium date. Preventive Medicine faculty leased storage decreased by 20 boxes. Another 12 of their boxes are scheduled to relocate this winter. Joe Collins reports that the Observatory LC Periodical integration is nearly completed. Clint Grantham reports that in December he completed 1 1/2 more boxes of the joint Management/Central duplicates-transfer project. We hope to have this completed by Spring. The Central Arts "Picture Files" move for December was re-scheduled for January 8th.

Second quarter 2001/2002 1180's for our 37 University tenants' pro-rated storage charges were initiated. The distribution should be completed by January 7th.

33 visitors were on site during December. Professor Helguera continued his daily work on-site at the Annex.

LITS installed a replacement monitor and replacement bar code reader on our 2nd floor generic workstation on December 3rd.

Throughout the month, George Anglin worked on switching all Annex workstations from Server Five to Server Four. Complications with Server Four created the need to come back and transfer everyone to Server One.

The team met to discuss redistributing subject responsibilities necessitated by Norma Riddick’s upcoming retirement. The major changes are:

Special Collections liaison will be Pete Wilson.

History goes to Susan Bell and Rich Murray, with Zora Breeding doing materials in German.

Classical Studies goes to Don Jones.

Music will be handled by Jeff Taylor and Mary Charles Lasater for now.

Philosophy goes to Susan Bell.

CAAG members, including Zora Breeding, Mary Charles Lasater, and Ann Ercelawn, tried to do as much testing of the Unicorn 2001 upgrade as possible although several issues got in the way of a thorough review. Installation of the test server for members was not available until late in December, the browse indexes were missing from the test server, various authorizations were not set up until too late to test, etc. Luckily, there were no changes needing procedures or training that affect cataloging. The one new cataloging feature (global copy edit) will be tried and documented sometime in January.

Mary Charles was contacted by Marcive with an offer of a new service that should really help with the authorities workflow. At no additional charge, Marcive will keep a record of the headings that did not match an authority record and once a month they will send us a file of the authority records that have been distributed in the meantime that match that file of headings. Currently, we only get authority records that match our headings at the time we send the records to Marcive. Since we create many authority records in the process of cataloging, we will be able to receive these without having to code bibliographic records and create a separate file to send to Marcive as we do now.

Ann Ercelawn has been asked by the Library of Congress to participate in a group considering rule interpretations for revised chapter 12 of AACR2. Rich Murray devoted some time to preparing for ALA midwinter activities of the NMRT group he is co-chairing.

Ann Barnette cataloged lots of theses and several people tackled older materials – Norma Riddick worked on some newly unearthed Special Collections materials and Rich Murray cataloged some of the older Spanish/Portuguese inventory. Jeff Taylor devoted the month to

cataloging Music cds. Becky Atack worked on Russian materials. Zora Breeding cataloged more of the Waldinger gifts. Jean Wright reports that the call number lists of non-converted Dewey government publications is now completed.

In Authorities, with Error 9 finished, Denise Chavez and Sue Richardson have now moved on to clearing out the backlog of withdrawn bibliographic records and working on the backlog of unauthorized headings lists. Mary Charles is working on the backlog of LC Subject headings lists, authority problems and cataloging and the "plan of action" for creating bibliographic records for the unconverted Peabody College theses.

In spite of numerous vacations taken over the holidays, team members cataloged 1878 of the 2533 total new titles processed in Dec. The authorities unit reports that a total of 16,774 new or modified authority records were added to our database. The team modified 2953 access points on bibliographic records as part of regular authorities maintenance.

3344 periodical and serial issues received.

267 gift titles and 946 approvals added

1223 new orders created

652 items speed cataloged

Approximately 1677 firm orders received

Purchase requests continue to be light, but we expect that to end shortly now that we've rounded the bend into the second half of the fiscal year.

At the beginning of the month, we were visited by Ebsco's representative Tommy Smith. Tommy demonstrated Ebsco Online, Ebsco's "comprehensive system for electronic journal access and management". Rick Stringer-Hye, John Haar, and Brent Mai were in attendance. We subsequently set up a trial for this product.

Ebsco also (finally) supplied us with an electronic version of the 2002 renewal invoice, and we are currently working with Dale Poulter on getting that loaded into Acorn.

We have also received our first electronic invoice from Swets Blackwell, and hope to get it loaded soon as well.

In spite of the holidays, the team still processed a large number of volumes. Binding, Marking, and Repair all received large numbers of items from Central at semester's end.

1,907 volumes sent to bindery including:

1,107 monographs,

634 periodicals,

152 serials, and

14 rebinds

Quality control problems and changing procedures at the bindery kept the team hopping during the month.

Machelle Keen sorted 1,007 Central paperbacks in December and sent 408 (40%) directly to the bindery. Her 2001 statistics show that she sorted 15,146 Central monographs over the course of the calendar year. While the percentage of items selected for immediate binding fluctuated monthly during the year, the percentage averaged out to about 52%.

Sheranda Lee updated 396 Acorn holdings records in December as a result of binding. Linda Davis continues to assist the team with this task.

There is a substantial backlog of monograph items waiting to go to the bindery, including several hundred circulated Central paperbacks returned at semester's end. The team is also working to receive all the items returned from the bindery and is currently one shipment behind on the monographs.

A slightly lower number of items were labeled in December due to vacations. But the flow of materials kept up its pace and the shelves remained full. With everyone's participation, the team was able to label items within two weeks of their arrival in the unit.

3,703 books labeled

197 RUSH books,

152 unbound serials, and

109 reels of microfilm

One of the venerable marking printers died in December and another older printer of the same model replaced it. That, too, has already bitten the dust, so LITS is investigating new printer options

93 volumes were repaired with 181 treatments.

The largest quantity of the repairs was spine replacements for Central.

Charlotte contributes a couple of hours each day to marking activities. Therefore, repair activities are reduced.

Charlotte reports having constructed the biggest enclosure ever. It measures 42" by 30" and will house Vanderbilt campus plans from Special Collections. Before making the enclosure, the plans had to be convinced to lay flat. Because they had been rolled up for many years, it took 6 months of coaxing to relax them enough for flat storage.