Technical Services Monthly Report
August 2002
DIVISION-WIDE ACTIVITIES:
August began with the installation of a new version of Acorn. As usual there were a few surprises, in addition to the planned down time during the upgrade. Monica Sanchez, Chris Waldrop and Mary Ellen Wilson spent a significant amount of time testing the upgrade. They and several other staff participated in a conference call with Lisa Witteman (Sirsi) to discuss some of the bugs in the new Order Wizards, and have done some subsequent testing of the software. They are still testing, but not yet using the new Order Wizards. Although there are no major improvements for cataloging functionality, a casualty of the frequently used cataloging wizards was to Transfer Item. Zora Breeding met with Nancy Boggess-Korekach and Mary Ellen Wilson to investigate the scope of the problem and Nancy is working with Sirsi to try to get some resolution. We have found a work around, but are hoping that this will be fixed soon.
On August 12th, most staff attended the Technical Services-wide meeting to discuss areas for future focus and possible task forces within Technical Services.
The TS Web Task Force members, Ann Ercelawn, Angel Bruner, and Charlotte Lew, have been working feverishly to have the newly designed TS documentation page ready to go live in early September. The design and organization are a great improvement and we are all looking forward to its implementation. All teams in Tech Services have been involved in writing or updating procedures to add to the pages.
Ann Ercelawn, on behalf of the Series Task Force, completed basic series verification training for Order Services staff in preparation for their implementation of the new series verification procedure. Some team members are doing well on their own with the new procedure, others will have to continue to work with assistance for a while.
The Tech Services Workflow Task Force re-constituted a Reduction of Inventory Project Task Force (RIP) (Susan Bell, chair, Pete Wilson, Peg Earheart, Eileen Crawford, Sue Davis and Nancy Boggess-Korekach).
PERSONNEL:
Peg Earheart received notification from the Employee Celebration Committee that she was one of the nominees for this year's Commodore Award.
Gina Berry, currently working in Order Services Serials, will begin training as a verifier. Gina brings diverse language skills to the position - Russian, Czech, French, and German, among others, and will be missed in Serials. In the meantime, we are interviewing to fill our LAIII position, as a Serial Receiver.
Ann Ercelawn traveled to Huntsville, Alabama to give the SCCTP Basic Serials Cataloging workshop.
Many CATs helped with Central student orientation, taking turns sitting in the text at the student union and serving as back-up tour guides. We are always happy to be able to come out and interact with students, even if it sometimes takes a personal visit to remind us to volunteer.
Mary Beth Blalock and Susan Widmer visited Order Services for a brief tour. Zora Breeding also gave them a tour of the Cataloging and Authorities workroom.
In addition to helping to design and implement a new TS documentation page, Ann Ercelawn was also busy with the library Web Task Force to bring up the new Heard home page. Many TS staff attended that group’s hosting of a Heard home page open house in the electronic classroom. Many also attended the iLink open house.
The Preservation Team thanked summer student assistants and celebrated recent achievements with a pizza lunch on August 15. Lesley Grantham, Myra Foxworth, and Carrie Sprouse (on temporary loan from Central) all greatly helped Preservation keep pace with the workflow during the summer.
In the Library Annex, summer temporary assistant, Greg Hall resigned Friday, August 9th to return to Belmont University. Anish Patel, Special Collections student assistant who spent 50% of his working day at the Library Annex this summer left on Friday, August 16th. Both Will Stringfellow and Matt Williams have gone back to school but will remain as our Temporary Staff, and will continue to help us with the Stacks Compression project.
Eugene Berger, Helguera Project Staff member has returned from his summer research in Chile. His first day back at the Annex was Friday, August 23rd. Professor Helguera has reduced his daily Annex office hours to now be only on Monday, Wednesday and Fridays.
We were deeply saddened by the death of a long-time friend. Anthony Buchanan will be sorely missed.
LIBRARY ANNEX:
Leonor Van Cotthem and Linda Davis completed the backlog of microfiche labeling. Tuesday, August 27th, we celebrated when the last packet of backlogged microfiche was mailed to the Central Library. For the new labeling procedure, Roberta Winjum and Sue Davis worked with June McNeil from the VU Department of Rehabilitation Services who provided ergonomic analysis and advice.
Roberta Winjum attended an 8/15 meeting at the Annex at which Linda Davis explained the serial maintenance she performs as part of her RS Maintenance responsibilities.
Our former Alumni and Development 2nd floor storage room is being re-designed and designated as the "Peabody Room". It will be devoted to use by University Archives and Special Collections to hold Peabody pre-merger archives and other Special Collections department collections specific to pre-merger Peabody. Components of shelving stored in the Annex basement will be installed in this room, as compact shelving cannot be budgeted at this time.
On August 5th, University Archives received another direct shipment of 130 boxes of departmental archives from Alumni and Development.
Friday, August 23rd, the Vanderbilt University Arts Picture Files ownership was transferred to the Metropolitan Nashville School System. It is now located at Nashville School of the Arts where all of the Nashville High Schools will have the opportunity to circulate portions of the collection to their Arts students.
Peg worked with 3 staff members in the Department of Economics, as well as 3rd party movers, on the culmination of a two-year project regarding storage items.
Two Frist Center staff met with Peg on August 7th at the Annex. As part of an upcoming British painters exhibit, they wished to recreate an English private library. 12 items stored in the Annex have been loaned to the Frist Center.
Clint Grantham worked on maintenance, transfers for Central and Divinity, removing some Gov Docs, and a Peabody withdrawal project. Leonor Van Cotthem and Linda Davis worked on Observatory transfers and ILL’s. Leonor also did OCLC holdings cancels, and Linda did withdrawals and Annex circulation requests.
Joe Collins has been unable to send e-mail from his workstation for most of August. It has been a curious problem because he can receive e-mail from any of the generic workstations.
Statistics:
267 linear feet of new transfers
Much of August was devoted to the staged Dyer Observatory transfers. It will still take many months to complete the Acorn work before these can be taken out of staging, and placed in the storage stacks.
370 items retrieved and circulated to VU campus
25 items owned by one library, but circulated to another
25 pages of articles faxed to 3 patrons
171 patrons who requested materials via Web
32 visitors, scholars, guests
344 pages photocopied for 38 requestors
4 RS Inventory and 1 Divinity Inventory items stored in the RS stacks requested by Inter-Library Loan patrons
4,427 Acorn records edited
4 reconned titles
548 withdrawals
3 reinstatements
1 RS Maintenance intra-library transfers (campus libraries, not Annex)
FYI stat: On 8/29, 428,307 items that were stored in the Library Annex were bar coded and had call records. Many of our periodicals and most of our "shelve by title" items still remain bar code challenged.
CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES TEAM:
Books and materials are arriving in great numbers as we struggle to keep up with cataloging while giving and receiving training and working on various projects. We are grateful that we received some new shelving recently, but every shelf in the room is already overflowing.
A new shipment of theses arrived late in the month and has been partially processed by Jeff Taylor. Yuh-Fen Benda finished analyzing another 117 volumes of the Chinese dynasty collection. Denise Chavez is searching Curriculum Lab materials for Susan Bell, including the collection of TN textbooks. Ann Ercelawn, with help from Bryan Kurowski, worked to resolve the URL change for the IEEE journals. All but a handful of Waldinger gifts have been processed and cataloged. Jeff Taylor finished cataloging the last of the tango CD’s and began work on a set of USGS CD-ROMs.
Special Collections sent 5 tubs of new materials to Pete Wilson for cataloging. When Pete took over Special Collections cataloging, it was at a time when they were still only adding about 100 books per year. Seeing this many books arrive on an almost monthly basis has Pete a little worried, but as usual, he just redoubles his efforts and plunges on.
Mary Charles Lasater began NACO training for Michael Scott, Catherine Gick and Bryan Kurowski. Denise Chavez and Yuh-Fen Benda helped her with preparations and also attended some of the sessions. Other library staff attended some sessions to refresh their own training. One more session is planned to complete the current round of training.
Michael Scott continues to work daily with Don Jones on cataloging training and questions. Bryan Kurowski is training with Becky Atack to search on OCLC for the original catalogers. Both Michael and Bryan spent many hours doing authority homework as part of the NACO training. Denise Chavez has volunteered to help Divinity staff learn to use the CatME software. She worked with Catherine Gick to learn to use some CatME macros available through the web. Ann Ercelawn worked on the beta testing of the Serial Solutions records.
Mary Charles Lasater has worked to determine the authorities clean up needed due to the massive load of Early English Books Online and Microfilm titles into Acorn prior to reindexing. She hopes to get to these as a future project.
Susan Bell is working with LeeAnn Lannom to begin classifying new materials going to the Curriculum Lab into LC rather than their unique call number scheme. The Peabody library also wants to move their "Big Books" collection from its present Curriculum Lab location into Youth, where it fits better; again Susan and Lee Ann are working out the details.
Mary Charles Lasater spent some time working up a proposal for how to deal with the 4,000+ Peabody masters theses that have never been available on Acorn.
ORDER SERVICES:
Overall, the month has been a very busy one for Order Services. We have processed many orders for Special Collections, and Procurement Card purchases were at an all time high (over 40 titles). Many of these were rush purchases or books ordered from online bookshops.
Chris Waldrop and Mary Ellen Wilson, along with Roberta Winjum, met with Michael Walmsley from Faxon/Divine.
Statistics:
1113 new approvals added
59 gift titles
3811 serials/periodicals received
1244 orders created
786 titles speed cataloged.
PRESERVATION:
Sue Davis and Charlotte Lew continued work on PUP (Peabody Upper vault Project) with Kathy Smith of Special Collections. During weekly August visits the Terrific Trio reviewed, cleaned, and sorted 588 volumes. Stacy Owens kept the group generously supplied with books from the upper vault shelves.
Sue Davis uploaded data and generated reports from the Annex PEM. In addition, she forwarded the data to the research trial headquarters in Rochester, NY. The reports she produces are helpful to Annex staff and building service representatives.
Binding:
1738 volumes sent including
982 monographs
507 periodicals
216 serials and
33 rebinds
503 Acorn holdings records updated
1117 new Central paperbacks sorted
434 (39%) selected for immediate binding
86 items rebarcoded
After repeated attempts, binding staff hopes that they have corrected a persistent box-labeling problem on return shipments. The incorrect or missing labels slowed down receiving of the materials and caused some errors on invoices.
We have paid Heckman Bindery invoices through the first August binding shipment.
Marking:
Marking was slow for a while, but picked up during the last week of the month. Apparently the marking genie knew that Ann was on vacation. As of Sept. 3, the team was labeling items that arrived on August 27.
3,512 regular volumes
140 RUSH items
229 unbound serials
55 reels of microfilm.
Repair:
302 volumes repaired with 360 treatments
Most of the effort focused on Special Collections and Central items, but staff also treated Baudelaire, Law, Music, and Science materials. A major chunk of the work involved a large wrapper box order.