The Technical Services Workflow Task Force met twice this month, first with the Series Task Force to hear their report and recommendations. These are now being discussed within Tech Services teams prior to final revision and implementation. Series Task Force members include Laurie Power (chair), Yan-Xia Zhong, Bryan Kurowski, and Yuh Fen Benda.

The second TSWFTF meeting included the entire Preservation Team, to discuss their workflow and workload. Linda Davis also attended that meeting. The group identified some strategies that may help give Preservation some relief.

Finally, the TSWFTF appointed a new Materials Routing Task Force, to look at the flow of materials in and out of the Baker Mailroom. Chris Waldrop chairs this task force, and members include Susan Bell, Suzanne Bell, Karen Pillow, and Dennis Sauls.

While at ALA, Rich, Zora and Roberta had the opportunity to meet with OCLC Library Services consultants to discuss questions posed by the Inventory Reduction Task Force concerning OCLC’s Retrocon Batch service. The task force, chaired by Rich Murray, met afterward to discuss OCLC’s response to our questions and to decide the next steps in our pursuit of sending records of inventory materials to OCLC for electronic matching against the database. Besides Rich, inventory Reduction Task Force members include Susan Bell, Zora Breeding, Don Jones, Pete Wilson, Nancy Boggess-Korekach, Sue Davis, and Peg Earheart.

Linda Davis increased bindery pattern edit assistance to help the Marking and Binding staff with their current and retrospective work. Debbie Williams continues to volunteer some of her time in Binding & Marking also.

Jean Wright, Larry Romans, and Mike Moreland visited the Library Annex to inventory "Not on Acorn" Dewey materials, and make collection decisions. They were able to identify about 13 ½

linear feet of State of Tennessee documents which Annex staff prepared to donate to the State Library and Archives.

Team projects and goals for 2002/2003 are in the process of being reviewed and revised.

We welcomed staff back from their holiday vacations, and then watched as the flu claimed many of them for several days’ absence. Ah, winter!

Several staff attended the ALA Midwinter meeting in New Orleans. These include Susan Bell, Zora Breeding, Sue Davis, Ann Ercelawn, Mary Charles Lasater, Rich Murray, and Roberta Winjum. Ann Ercelawn also attended pre-conference train-the-trainer workshops for SCCTP's new Advanced Serials Cataloging and Electronic Serials courses. Roberta did a presentation at the Role of the Professional in Academic Technical Services discussion group on "Improving Technical Services Workflow", describing our task force concept.

Some staff who were unable to attend ALA attempted to watch the webcast of the OCLC symposium.

Peg Earheart was asked to test a DreamWeaver tutorial designed by New Horizons. She found it very well designed and easy to navigate. The on-line tutorial is available 24/7. Peg reported on her experiences with Dreamweaver in the January 22 Training Coordinators meeting.

Clint Grantham serves on a CAG sub-committee studying Patron Specified Deliveries from the Library Annex.

Mary Charles Lasater presented a very informative brown bag on Authority Control in Sirsi. Denise Chavez assisted with preparations and keyboarding during the presentation. Several staff were able to attend.

Rich Murray accepted an invitation to serve on the Publicity Working Group of ALA's Better Salaries & Pay Equity Task Force, which is organized by ALA President-Elect Mitch Freedman.

Rich Murray and Ann Ercelawn are quoted fairly extensively in the book Jump Start Your Career in Library and Information Science, published this month by Scarecrow Press.

Yuh-Fen Benda helped to host some Chinese guests on campus and also helped to identify some collections of Chinese materials that might be of interest to them.

Mary Charles Lasater hosted a Pizza Party for the Cataloging and Authorities team to celebrate the end of the Error 9 project (to clean up split headings) completed late last month.

DeWanda Lee resigned from the Preservation Team. A search is underway to fill the vacancy as soon as possible. An additional student was hired to help in both Book Repair and Marking.

The Arts Picture files consisting of 12 filing cabinets, a Card catalog, customized cases, and canvas vats of loose prints were transferred to the Annex January 8th. Yvonne Boyer, Martha Young, a team of 6 VU movers, and Peg Earheart worked with this transfer.

Our Astronomy LC Periodical transfer phase was completed January 15th. This project initially began for us in August 2001. A special thanks to Jon Erickson, John Whelan, Carlin Sappenfield and all 4 Annex staff members for all their hard work on this particular phase. Carlin, Peg, and others still have plans for future Observatory Dewey transfers that need attention.

The Central Library plans to transfer an additional 103,500 volumes to the Library Annex over the next 18 months. Mary Beth Blalock and Peg met to discuss the scope of the project. Library Annex staff were updated about this development, and designs initiated to house a little over 43,000 of these volumes.

Our Science LC retrospective journals project was in high gear during January. We are hard at work on both the Q's and the T classifications.

Special Collections and University Archives staff continue to ship materials for temporary Annex storage weekly (if not daily). We've basically used every spare canvas vat, and spare book cart to hold materials that will be shipped back to campus in late Feb. They have to vacate completely some of their GLB floor space to create empty space for their new shelving. We also prepared an area for them in our basement for pieces of their "to be replaced" cantilever shelving. The latter won't arrive until mid-February.

116 linear feet of new transfers were received from Central, Divinity, Law, Management, Special Collections, and Science. This included newly processed gifts to VUL as well as rolling carts of stacks transfers. Music returned 3 boxes of the Robinson Collection gifts. (These were originally from Special Collections. Next, the Central Bibliographers will be offered these titles.)

Special Collections sent an additional 3 tubs of newly cataloged VColls.

Joe continues to shift and shelve 99% of all new Annex materials. We have been challenged in finding students who will work (or who will return to work) at the Library Annex.

754 items circulated to Central, Divinity, Education, Government Information, Inter-Library Loan, Law, Management, Music, Pia Collection, Resource Services, Science, and Special Collections. Material types included books, long-playing record albums, microfiche, microfilm, Paige miracle boxes for archives, and videos. Although we don't store Biomedical Library materials, we continue to have 1-2 Web requests per month that patrons mistakenly send to us. We simply forward the requests to Biomedical.

The highest sub-category of Annex January circulation belongs to the Central Dewey collection (193 items). The second highest was Science LC (97).

103 items for ILL were loaned from our Central, Divinity, Education, Management, Music, RS Inventory, and Science collections

85 items were pulled from the RS Inventory and sent to either ILL or Cataloging

43 additional ILL requests were not lendable due to fragile material or request for an item not owned

45 Inter-Library Loan patrons requested articles to be photocopied, for which we reproduced 398 pages

Non-faculty Web patrons continue to ask us to ship their Annex volumes to libraries other than the owning library. We look forward to the implementation of this service. Likewise, we are eager to help our patrons by faxing articles to their specified fax numbers. We probably had at least 12 such requests in January.

Central Business Group revised the design and plans for the installation of our new SpaceSaver electronic carriage module. Peg Earheart held two meetings with staff from CBG to work through these serious issues. We will have less space for new library books to be housed. The design plan for the University archive boxes were not affected.

Entrance steps to the Annex eroded during January. They are scheduled for replacement on Feb. 5th, weather dependent.

Roof leaks occurred in two places on Thursday morning, Jan. 24th. No books were in harm’s way. One area is under the copper roof, the other under the new roof.

Photocopy repair calls were placed 3 times during January. Lannis has provided a "work-around" while we await one more part. Peg is concerned that once we begin faxing articles for patrons, our current photocopier may be overly stressed. We will be keeping statistics of number of requests, number of pages, and number of service calls in support of whether or not we can justify a 2nd photocopier here at the Annex.

1848 Acorn records edited.

338 withdrawals processed for Central, Education, Management, Music, and Science

16 intra-library (non-Annex) transfers processed

3 volumes re-instated for the Central collection

3 brief records reconned for Education Annex

Institutional Planning and Development, the Owen School faculty, and Preventive Medicine each reduced their Annex square footage storage space in January. The Legal Clinic made plans to significantly compress their current storage, in order to be able to send 2001 files later this Spring.

Our University tenants were more actively involved with the Annex during January. Basically, each year, when the tenants receive their Dec. 1180's, we can pretty much plan that they'll be in active use of the Annex in January. Such was again the case this time.

Well, no wonder January flew by! We had 102 visitors. Guests included: Arts and Science faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates, Baudelaire Center staff, Central Library Collections Development Librarians, Information Technology Services staff, Institutional Planning and Development, O.U.L, Owen School, Resource Services, Student Accounts, University School faculty, and the VU Theatre department.

While others were at ALA, Don Jones, Pete Wilson, and the support staff stayed home to handle any cataloging emergencies that sprang up. Pete took advantage of the quiet time to work on the IMF Working Papers. He has now officially taken on the responsibilities as cataloging liaison for Special Collections. During the month, Ann Barnette concentrated on finishing the theses and then also began on the IMF papers. Ann and Laurie Power were able to catch up on the German and French materials that had built up in their area. Denise Chavez was able to clear out some of the backlogged authority work on withdrawals. Jeff Taylor and Becky Atack worked on another large batch of Music CD’s. Ann Ercelawn and Yuh-Fen Benda worked on e-journals, including 42 Ovid Psycharticle titles as well as a set of JSTOR business titles. Ann, again with Yuh-Fen’s assistance, worked on a list of cancelled CDROM ProQuest titles that were shadowed in Acorn but still showing "held by Central" in the OPAC and causing some confusion. Susan Bell and Becky continue to catalog the TN textbooks for Education.

Zora Breeding met with Ann E., Pete and Laurie to discuss some serials-processing related questions that came up during a task force discussion of serials workflow within OS.

Zora and Roberta met with Mary Charles Lasater to discuss the Education theses recon project that Mary Charles will head up in CAT, working closely with Annex staff. Denise, Yuh-Fen and Jeff will be helping with this project which is projected to last through this year. The goal is to catalog the 900+ Ed.S. theses that are currently not on Acorn, at the rate of about 20 per week.

The CATeam cataloged 2346 of the total 3277 new titles processed by RS in January. A total of 6904 new or modified authority records were added to our database. With the completion of the Error 9 project, the team only modified 996 access points on bibliographic records as part of regular authority maintenance. This number is down from an average of 3113 modifications per month in the previous 6 months.

Incoming purchase requests remain light. Firm orders in the mailroom are less than two weeks old. Serials and Periodicals are being received within 24-48 hours.

In the month of January, Order Services added 1082 approvals, 154 gift titles, created 1380 new orders, and received 4385 serials/periodicals. 920 titles were speed cataloged upon receipt.

Verifiers continue to process gifts when not working on approvals and purchase requests. Mary Ellen assisted Brenda McKee in setting up a few Acquisitions reports for the Law Library, and met with LeeAnn to discuss fund reports for Education.

The Swets-Blackwell and Ebsco major invoices have been automatically loaded into the live Acorn database, and errors cleaned up manually as necessary. The processing will be completed just as soon as Mary Ellen Wilson, Dale Poulter, Roberta Winjum, and Pat Johnson figure out how to enter the prepayment data within the Acorn/PeopleSoft interface environment. With a little help from Order Services and Dale, the Biomedical Library has also successfully automated the load of their Swets-Blackwell invoice for this year.

Following Christmas break the Preservation team made two backlogs highest priority -- the returned monograph binding shipment backlog and labeling backlog. The good news is that both backlogs have now been significantly reduced. In fact we had a record month in labeling and the team is to be commended for the tremendous effort.

The Climate Notebook software being tested as part of a national field trial developed problems (apparently lost some indexes) early in the month when new data was imported. Fortunately,

LITS came to the rescue and no data was lost. The software is functioning once again.

1,568 volumes sent to the bindery, including

783 new monographs

636 periodicals

149 serials

Because the team focused on receiving the large backlog of monographs returned from the bindery, fewer monograph items were sent. The priority will switch to sending more monographs once the returns have been received. Periodical and serial titles continue to be sent following normal practice.

Machelle Keen sorted 1,267 new Central paperbacks in January. She selected 631 volumes (50%) for immediate binding.

In addition to the help from Linda Davis, Sheranda Lee also updated 372 Acorn holdings as a result of binding.

Effective with the January 24 shipment to Heckman Bindery, the bindery will supply security strips for all materials except those belonging to the Management Library. A separate profile has been established to keep Management Items separate at the bindery. Invoices and corresponding payments online from this date forward will reflect this change for monographs. The bindery has been inserting security strips in periodicals and serials since last October. For more details please contact Sue Davis, Machelle Keen, or Karen Pillow.

While at ALA, Sue Davis met with representatives of Heckman Bindery to discuss their persistent quality control problems.

The entire team continued to be involved in marking, including the two students. In spite of hardware and software problems, the extra push paid off big time.

5,637 volumes labeled, plus

321 RUSH items

240 unbound serials

86 microfilm reels.

This sets a new team record! A quick search back through to fiscal year 95/96 statistics shows only one month (March 2001) even coming close to this new monthly record.

The oldest material waiting for labeling (aside from lower priority re-labeling projects) dates from Jan. 24.

One of the venerable marking printers died in early January. That left only one printer holding down the fort until a replacement printer arrived. Murphy's Law was in full force during the entire replacement process, but happily, a new printer was successfully installed last week. We are vigorously testing the new printer. If it holds up well, then the other old marking printer will be replaced with the same model. Labeling software problems slowed down manual labeling, but these, too, have been resolved.

273 volumes repaired with 338 treatments.

Work focused on the lab's two largest customers, Central and Special Collections, but almost every library in the system received some level of service in January. Most of the work involved wrappers and other enclosures (some made in-house, others purchased after custom measuring) for Special Collections, and spine repairs and wrappers for Central.