Technical Services Monthly Report

Decemmber 2002

DIVISION-WIDE ACTIVITIES:

The Reduction in Inventory Project was in full swing as members of the task force prepared the final report, due at the beginning of Jan. Materials sent from the Annex for the project became a bit backlogged due to vacations, but work on these materials managed to reduce the total uncataloged inventory by another 1.8%.

The recently formed Cataloging Workflow Task force (Pete Wilson, chair; Bryan Kurowski, Becky Atack, Monica Sanchez and Alice Cunningham, members) held its first meeting in December.

The Serials Solutions Group met to discuss plans to load the records into test and the types of cleanup that will need to be done. The group is planning an Open House on Jan. 10th. Roberta Winjum described the product and presented the group’s recommendations to LMC.

Please note: During the month, we decided to discontinue work on e-journal bibliographic records pending the implementation of Serials Solutions. Updates to e-journals bib records have been discontinued as of Jan. 1.

December marked the end of Resource Services, and with it the end of several working groups. The RS Management Team and RSIG both held their last meetings.

Roberta Winjum will chair a new Task Force on Electronic Resources. Members will include Zora Breeding, Ann Ercelawn, Rick Stringer-Hye, Nancy Boggess-Korekach, Chris Waldrop, and Mary Beth Blalock. That group will begin meeting in the New Year.

PERSONNEL ACTIVITIES AND EVENTS:

Ann Ercelawn traveled to St. Louis to conduct a Basic Serials Cataloging workshop for the Missouri Library Network.

On Dec 17, Monica Sanchez, Mary Ellen Wilson, and Roberta Winjum attended the Coutts/Nijhoff presentation.

Many catalogers and RSIG members participated in the group photo of GLB librarians.

Several staff attended the OCLC video on the Patriot Act.

Social events: Most in Tech Services were able to attend the Resource Services Farewell gathering. A majority of the Tech Services staff was able to attend the Chancellor’s breakfast, the Vanderbilt Winter Fest, and the GLB holiday get-together. Some of us braved the cold weather to cross the new pedestrian bridge on its opening day. On Dec 16^th, Baker once again held our Annual Cookie Exchange. Many delightful cookies and recipes were exchanged and enjoyed.

CATALOGING AND AUTHORITIES:

Despite the holiday celebrations and vacations taken, it was a more productive month for cataloging than last month. The flow of new materials may have slowed due to the holidays, but you couldn’t tell that from the number of materials awaiting cataloging on every shelf and truck in the room. Becky Atack and Yuh-Fen Benda brought in 150-250 new series authority records. We also continued to work on various projects and several task forces and committees were quite productive during the month. Pete Wilson made some progress on the ICPSR codebooks. Denise Chavez, Jeff Taylor and Mary Charles Lasater worked on cataloging more of the old Peabody theses. Bryan Kurowski and Jeff Taylor cataloged RIP books from the inventory. Ann Ercelawn cataloged additional e-journals in JSTOR. Jean Wright continued to work on resolving some of the problems with Government Documents depository records that surfaced during the gathering of ARL statistics. Michael Scott’s training is progressing well and Don Jones and Pete Wilson are only reviewing his original cataloging and OCLC enhancements. We continued preparations for Linda Davis to become part of CAT.

The CAAG Formats Task Force (Mary Charles Lasater, chair; Catherine Gick, Ann Ercelawn, Eileen Crawford, Nancy Boggess-Korekach and Zora Breeding, members; Denise Chavez, Bryan Kurowski, Pete Wilson, and Michael Scott drafted to help) met during the month to discuss further changes to the hypertext policies. The group decided to get input from public services staff on the changes we have made and some that we are proposing. Mary Charles Lasater is preparing to conduct the demonstration/discussion on Jan. 6.

The CAG/CAAG Item Types Task Force of which Zora Breeding is a member met in December and looked at some reports prepared by Anne Martin showing which libraries use each item type. Members of the group took some of the apparent mistakes back to their libraries for clean up.

Statistics:

1745 new titles cataloged

Over 300 titles recataloged

ORDER SERVICES:

While the month seemed shorter than usual, it was a very busy one for OS staff. We've seen a steady stream of materials come and go from the Baker Mailroom.

In the month of December, OS staff:

Received and processed:

Serials/Periodicals: 4270

Firm orders: 1103

Approvals: 537

Added to Acorn:

SSO's: 220

Gifts: 227

In addition, 713 new orders were placed (134 of these using the Procurement card), and 653 titles were cataloged.

OS continues to process new materials quickly. Materials in the mailroom awaiting processing are less than a week old; periodicals are being processed the day they are received. The oldest

purchase requests awaiting processing date from just prior to the holidays. We expect to have these caught up soon.

Also in December:

A glitch in the PromptCat load caused one of the Blackwell bibloads to load the same batch of records every day for several consecutive days - creating multiple Approval records for that batch. The verifiers have now processed nearly all of the corresponding materials, and have removed the extra records as they came across them.

At the Dec 12 OS meeting Monica Sanchez reported to OS on her attendance at the NALA Customer Service workshop; Chris Waldrop updated us on the most recent Technology Support Coordinator's meeting and issues regarding passwords.

PRESERVATION:

Because most library patrons return items only at the end of the semester, both the circulation departments and the Binding/Marking units feel a big crunch this time of year. At least 4 trucks of Central paperbacks were sent to the team for binding as the semester wound down. Machelle Keen has already rebarcoded 180 volumes (roughly 1/4 of the total) in preparation for binding. She is working through the rest as fast as she can.

Another result of the end-of-semester book return is that Central sent a few hundred books to the repair lab. The shelves are once again full.

Charlotte Lew and Sue Davis are in the final stages of the PUP project at Peabody. They anticipate wrapping things up in January. During two visits in December they (along with Kathy Smith) inspected, sorted, and cleaned 418 items.

Sue Davis is also happy to report that the PEM field trial is nearing completion. She uploaded and sent the last of the temperature and RH data to IPI early in December. The PEMs and Climate Notebook will remain functional and Sue plans to continue to monitor the environment in the Annex and Special Collections vault for the foreseeable future.

Sue Davis consulted with Yvonne Boyer and Dewey James about environmental issues in the French Center.

Binding:

534 monographs

30 rebinds

202 periodicals

19 serials

785 total volumes sent

209 Acorn records updated as a result of binding

1031 new Central paperbacks sorted; 430 selected for immediate binding

A total of 13,373 Central volumes were sorted in 2002, and an average of 43% were sent for immediate binding with the monthly percentages fluctuating between 38%-50%.

Due to the bindery's holiday schedule, only one binding shipment took place in December. The first shipment for 2003 went out on Jan. 2.

A small backlog of monograph economy binding is waiting to go out with the next binding shipment. A few monographs are still waiting to be received from the last returned shipment. By the time most of you read this report, both of these backlogs should be taken care of.

Oldest bindery invoices awaiting processing date from 11/22/02.

Marking:

2,781 volumes

250 unbound serials

155 RUSH items

27 microfilm reels were labeled during the month.

The entire team pitched in to keep the marking shelves under control. As of Jan. 2 staff were labeling items that came to the unit on December 18.

Repair:

202 items were repaired with 340 treatments. Many of those items received protective wrapper boxes. The repair lab served Central, Divinity, Law, Music, Science/Engineering, and Special Collections over the course of the month.

FLASH:

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